“Yes, sir.”
She still stood in the doorway, irresolute, surprised.
“What the devil are you waiting there for, Symons?”
“Nothing, sir.”
And she withdrew, with her dignity balanced on the tip of a very much tilted nose.
Parker Steel opened the window wide, and leaning his hands on the sill, looked out into the garden. It was air that he needed—air amid the stifling complexities of life that were crowding tumultuous upon his future. The garden with the sumptuous serenity of its trees and flowers had no sympathetic touch for him in his agony of isolation. It was his loneliness that weighed upon him heavily at that moment. He had outlawed himself, as it were, from the heart of his own wife. The very house was a pest-house in which two stricken souls were sundered and held apart.
If Betty would only see him. If she could only bring herself to understand that he had acted this disastrous part in order to retain the social satisfactions that she loved. Any companionship, even the companionship of a half-estranged wife, seemed preferable to the isolation that he felt deepening about him. He argued that it was his realization of Betty’s ambition that had made him dissemble for her sake. Any argument, however suspicious, is pressed into the service of a man whose whole desire is to justify himself.
Unfortunately, when a woman’s trust has been once shocked from its foundations, no buttressing and underpinning can save that superstructure of sentiment that has taken years to build. Betty had kept to her room with no one but Madge Ellison to give her sympathy and advice. The husband had always found the friend embarrassing with her presence any rapprochement between him and his wife.
As he stood at the open window, with the words of the two letters he had read weaving a hopeless tangle of bewilderment in his brain, he heard some one descend the stairs and go out by the front door into the square. Parker Steel realized that this ubiquitous and embarrassing friend had left Betty alone in the room above. There was some chance at last of his seeing her alone, and of attempting to break down the barrier of her reserve.
He climbed the stairs slowly, and stood listening for several seconds on the landing before turning the handle of his wife’s door. The door was locked.