She dropped beside him and slipped into his arms, shutting her eyes and lifting her cheek to his. “Tell me one thing,” Fred whispered. “You said that night on the boat, when I first told you, that if you could you would crush it all up in your hands and throw it into the sea. Would you, all those weeks?”

She shook her head.

“Answer me, would you?”

“No, I was angry then. I’m not now. I’d never give them up. Don’t make me pay too much.” In that embrace they lived over again all the others. When Thea drew away from him, she dropped her face in her hands. “You are good to me,” she breathed, “you are!”

Rising to his feet, he put his hands under her elbows and lifted her gently. He drew her toward the door with him. “Get all you can. Be generous with yourself. Don’t stop short of splendid things. I want them for you more than I want anything else, more than I want one splendid thing for myself. I can’t help feeling that you’ll gain, somehow, by my losing so much. That you’ll gain the very thing I lose. Take care of her, as Harsanyi said. She’s wonderful!” He kissed her and went out of the door without looking back, just as if he were coming again to-morrow.

Thea went quickly into her bedroom. She brought out an armful of muslin things, knelt down, and began to lay them in the trays. Suddenly she stopped, dropped forward and leaned against the open trunk, her head on her arms. The tears fell down on the dark old carpet. It came over her how many people must have said good-bye and been unhappy in that room. Other people, before her time, had hired this room to cry in. Strange rooms and strange streets and faces, how sick at heart they made one! Why was she going so far, when what she wanted was some familiar place to hide in?—the rock house, her little room in Moonstone, her own bed. Oh, how good it would be to lie down in that little bed, to cut the nerve that kept one struggling, that pulled one on and on, to sink into peace there, with all the family safe and happy downstairs. After all, she was a Moonstone girl, one of the preacher’s children. Everything else was in Fred’s imagination. Why was she called upon to take such chances? Any safe, humdrum work that did not compromise her would be better. But if she failed now, she would lose her soul. There was nowhere to fall, after one took that step, except into abysses of wretchedness. She knew what abysses, for she could still hear the old man playing in the snowstorm, “Ach, ich habe sie verloren!” That melody was released in her like a passion of longing. Every nerve in her body thrilled to it. It brought her to her feet, carried her somehow to bed and into troubled sleep.

That night she taught in Moonstone again: she beat her pupils in hideous rages, she kept on beating them. She sang at funerals, and struggled at the piano with Harsanyi. In one dream she was looking into a hand-glass and thinking that she was getting better-looking, when the glass began to grow smaller and smaller and her own reflection to shrink, until she realized that she was looking into Ray Kennedy’s eyes, seeing her face in that look of his which she could never forget. All at once the eyes were Fred Ottenburg’s, and not Ray’s. All night she heard the shrieking of trains, whistling in and out of Moonstone, as she used to hear them in her sleep when they blew shrill in the winter air. But to-night they were terrifying,—the spectral, fated trains that “raced with death,” about which the old woman from the depot used to pray.

In the morning she wakened breathless after a struggle with Mrs. Livery Johnson’s daughter. She started up with a bound, threw the blankets back and sat on the edge of the bed, her night-dress open, her long braids hanging over her bosom, blinking at the daylight. After all, it was not too late. She was only twenty years old, and the boat sailed at noon. There was still time!

PART VI.
KRONBORG

Ten Years Later