Out into the broad, balmy sunlight the young man went. There was a despondent droop upon him. His step was slow and uncertain, his feet seemed to him to have weights attached to them. He walked on to the corner of the next street and leaned against a tree. From the city's palpitating heart and stony veins came the hum of traffic on wheels, the clanging of bells, the escaping of steam. Near by some one was practising a monotonous exercise on a piano. He looked up at the sky with the stare of a subject under hypnotic influence.
A lump was in his dry throat. He made an effort to swallow it down, but it stuck and pained him. Persons passing caught sight of his face and threw back stares of mute inquiry as they moved on. After half an hour of aimless wandering here and there through the crowded streets, he paused at the door of a bar-room. He recognized the big gilt sign on the plate-glass windows, and remembered being there years before at midnight with some jolly friends and being taken to his hotel in a cab. After all, whiskey now, as then, would furnish forgetfulness, and that was his right. He went in and sat down at a little round table in the corner of the room. On a shelf near him was a bowl of brown pretzels, a plate of salted pop-corn, a saucer of parched coffee-beans mixed with cloves. One of the bartenders came to him, a towel over his arm. “What will you have, sir?” he asked.
“Rye whiskey straight,” said the customer, his eyes on the sawdust at his feet. “Bring the bottle along.”
XXVI
TO Cynthia the day on which she expected Floyd to return from Atlanta passed slowly. Something told her that he would come straight to her from the station, on his arrival, and she was impatient to hear his news. The hack usually brought passengers over at six o'clock, and at that time she was on the porch looking expectantly down the road leading to the village. But he did not come. Seven o'clock struck—eight; supper was over and her parents and her grandmother were in bed.
“I simply will not go to meet him in the grape-arbor any more,” she said to herself. “He is waiting to come later, but I'll not go out, as much as I'd like to hear about his mother. He thinks my curiosity will drive me to it, but he shall see.” However, when alone in her room she paced the floor in an agony of indecision and beset by strange, unaccountable forebodings. Might not something have happened to him? At nine o'clock she was in bed, but not asleep. At half-past nine she got up. The big bed of feathers seemed a great, smothering instrument of torture; she could scarcely get her breath. Throwing a shawl over her, she went out on the porch and sat down in a chair.
She had been there only a moment when she heard her mother's step in the hall, and, turning her head, she saw the gaunt old woman's form in the doorway.
“I heard you walking about,” Mrs. Porter said, coldly, “and got up to see what was the matter. Are you sick?”