Dora dropped her eyes in surprise, for the gaze of her haughty visitor was full of undisguised anger.
“I didn't mean to offend you,” she said, humbly, “and I hope you will pardon me. I was only trying to do Fred a good turn, and I suppose I did it awkwardly. It is very good of you to come. Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” And Margaret swept from the room. As she crossed the porch and passed the little architect of a church of no mean design, he raised his eyes and said:
“Look, lady; that is the tower for the big bell (ding-dong!), and this is the door—” But she paid no heed to him, as, with a shrug, almost of disdain, she passed on to the gate.
“He is writing to her; he has been writing to her all these years,” she said within herself. “Perhaps he has even met her—she may have been to see him in other places. That is why she's lived so quietly—it gave her the chance to go and come as she liked. Perhaps he has put those ideas of Paris and free-love into her head. When he talked to me in New York he didn't mean that—that he cared for me deeply. He meant only that he wanted me and the rest of us here to overlook what he had done. When he told his silly old father that he would not come back unless I forgave him, he meant—he thought—he was trying to apologize—actually apologize—for having made love to me. I have lowered myself by going to her. It gave her that sly chance to stab me. She thinks I care. She thinks that I have been crying my eyes out about him. They have talked me over time after time. Oh, the shame of it—the utter shame of it!”
CHAPTER XX
MARGARET DEARING passed a restless, tumultuous night following the disturbing visit to Dora. In the evening she had joined her uncle at a game of whist in a nervous, abstracted way; she had played the piano in a spiritless fashion for her brother, who had come in tired from a long drive into the country, where he had performed a successful surgical operation; and then she had gone up to her bedchamber and thrown off the mask. She kept it off, for there was only the starlight to witness her white, blank face and piteously staring eyes as she sat at her window looking out. From the stretch of darkness below only one salient feature presented itself: it was the steadily burning light in Dora Barry's window. In her fancy Margaret saw the beautiful young mother bending over a table writing—writing to Fred Walton in answer to the last letter he had written. She rose suddenly, exasperated beyond endurance, and threw herself on her bed.
She rose late the next morning and breakfasted in the big, sombre dining-room after the General and Wynn had gone to town. The servant said something she hardly heard, to the effect that Wynn had received a letter which called him to Augusta, and that he might be absent for several days. Breakfast over, Margaret strolled down to a favorite seat of hers on the lawn. Why was it, she asked herself, with poignant chagrin, that she welcomed the position as putting her into the full view of any one chancing to look from Dora Barry's cottage? Had she been very subtle in self-analysis and very frank touching her own desires, she would have admitted the subtle suggestion of her attitude, her apparent absorption in the magazine that she held in hand; must it not convey to her watching neighbor a conviction that the conversation of the afternoon just passed had been of no possible moment to her—that it had, in fact, caused no ripple in the even current of her satisfied existence.