“I deserve my punishment—but I am not all bad. And so help me God, Kitty, my offer will hold good at any moment of my life!”
He had gone. She was alone, pacing the room, still shaken with the storm of elemental fury.
At last exhaustion weakened her. She drew aside the curtain before her bed, and threw herself down shivering with the shame that was eating into her bones.
“Oh, my God!” she moaned, “Oh, my God! That he should have learned—from him—”
She drew the sides of the pillow tight about her face. It was agony of degradation. Her body shuddered at the thought of his contempt, the shattering of his faith in her, the man's revolt at the brutality of the revelation. She had been dragged through the mire before his eyes. In her degradation she saw herself the object of his loathing.
The sharp striking of the little Swiss clock on her writing-table roused her. She raised a drawn face and looked in its direction. It was only eleven. She had thought hours had passed while she had lain there shivering. A little sense of dismay crept over her. If those few minutes had passed like hours, what would be the length of the hours themselves that had to be lived through that day?
If only she had sent him that letter, she thought bitterly. She might have fallen in his eyes, but not to those depths. He would have understood. The tremulous hope that his love would remain unclouded had sustained her. If only she could have spoken. A cynical irony seemed to govern the world.
She went to the window and looked into the street. A sudden impulse to go out of doors into the open air came over her and as quickly died away. She could not bear to walk along the street or in the public gardens—before hundreds of human eyes. Her soul felt naked and ashamed. If it had been country, where she could have gone and hidden herself in a quiet far-off corner, and laid her face upon the grass, and let the tree-branches whisper to her alone, it would have been different. She shrank from the contact of men and women—and yet her heart sank with a despairing sense of loneliness.
The consciousness of it came with a shock, as to one, who, on a North Country fell, suddenly finds himself isolated from outer things by an impenetrable mist. She hurried away from the window, sat down, through sheer physical weariness, on the chair by her writing-table, and buried her face in her hands.
A servant brought up a note. A fearful pang shot through her that it might be from Raine. The first glance showed her Hockmaster's handwriting. The envelope bore the printed heading of one of the cafés.