It was late afternoon but she did not go home. She walked to the park and sat on a bench and felt like an outcast as the evening shadows fell around her. It grew darker and people went past her going home--carrying bundles, hurrying. Motors slipped by carrying other people home. What was home? She didn’t have one. She and Dick didn’t have one. They were kept apart by shadows, kept apart because they couldn’t get close enough. It grew colder. She looked at her watch. The children would have had their supper. She should go home. But she felt as if she must do something definite first. Still she was not quite sure what it was that she must do. At last she rose unsteadily and made her way to a corner drugstore. It was deserted at the supper hour. Cecily saw her face as she looked across the counter into the glass, reddened with wind, streaked with tears (she hadn’t been conscious of crying) and her hat was askew. She asked the clerk for change and went into the telephone booth. “I shan’t be home for supper, Ellen--nor all night. I’m going to Allenby. Can you manage?” The other call was to get Dick’s exact address. It was eleven o’clock when she toiled up from the station to the hotel, and it took more courage than she had known she had left to face the clerk and ask for Mr. Allenby’s room. The clerk looked very dubious. “I’m Mrs. Allenby,” said Cecily, pushing a card across at him. “I’ll go right up. Evidently,” she lied, “he didn’t get my telegram.” “Very well, Mrs. Allenby,” said the clerk, still with a trace of dubiousness in his manner. What had Cecily the immaculate, the fastidious, come to, to be toiling up these noisy stairs at eleven o’clock at night in search of her husband? Baggageless, shrinking from the curious looks of the few lounge loafers. If she could only have crept in in the darkness. But she must knock and a woman at the other end of the hall was turning to look. Dick was hard to rouse. “Let me in,” said Cecily, hoarsely. She did not know her own voice. Nor did he. She could hear him lighting the gas, coming to the door, opening it. She fairly pushed him aside so that she could get in. “Cecily! For God’s sake, what’s the matter?” She looked at him gravely, her eyes flaring in her white face. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what was the matter. I must have been right. Don’t you see I must have been right. All I wanted was right things. But that doesn’t make any difference. I want you home. I came up--I came up--because I’m your wife.” And she tumbled over in a desolate worn-out little heap at his feet. CHAPTER XXX