Not once again did he call her by her given name, but, though he was
always formal, stiffly polite, never allowing an intimation of personal
regard to pass his lips, he could not hide the adoration in his eyes. It
came through his dogged resolution to hold it back, for he could not
keep his gaze from following her every move, every bend of her neck,
change of her lips, lift of her arms and shoulders or free, rhythmic
movement as she walked.
Ann saw and read that light and, though something in her kept demanding
that she blind herself to its significance, that, if necessary to
accomplish this, she refuse to give Bayard gaze for gaze, she could no
more have hidden the fact of that evidence of his love from her
understanding than she could have stopped the quickening of her pulse
when he approached.
Nora saw that light, too. She saw the trouble with it in his face;
and the realization of what it all meant was like a stab in the breast.
He had ceased entirely to laugh and banter with her as he had done
before Ann Lytton came to Yavapai; in other days he had always eaten at
the Manzanita House when in town, and his humorous chiding had been one
of the things in which the girl found simple delight. Now, he came and
went without eating; his words to her were few, almost without exception
they were of the other woman and, always, his speech was sober.
Mrs. Weyl returned to Yavapai and with her coming Ann found another
outlet for the trouble that she fought vainly to repress. To Bayard she
had given the fullest detail of her confidence; through Nora she had
found a method of forgetting for short successions of hours. But Bayard
was a man, and between them was the peculiar barrier which his love had
erected; Nora was not the type to which Ann would go for comfort and
there, anyhow, was again a dividing circumstance which could not wholly
be overcome. It was the emotional receptiveness of an understanding
woman that Ann Lytton needed; she wanted to be mothered, to be pitied,
to be assured in the terms of her kind and all that she found in the
clergyman's wife.
"Why, the poor child!" that good woman had cried when, on her arrival
home, her husband had told her of Ann's presence. "And you say her
brother has disappeared?"
"From Yavapai, yes; I suspect, though, that Bruce Bayard knows
something of where he is and I guess the girl could find him. Something
peculiar about it, though. Bruce is worried. And I think he's quite
desperately in love."
Forthwith, his wife dropped all other duties and went to Ann. In fifteen
minutes the novelty of acquaintance had worn off and in an hour Ann was
crying in the motherly arms, while she poured her whole wretched story
into the sympathetic ears; that is, all of the story up to the day when
Bruce Bayard told her why she must not help him nurse Ned Lytton back to
physical and moral health.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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