Love stories; Reformatories -- Fiction; Social classes -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
She now remembered that her one trunk, with Craig's many upon which
she depended, was stored on the top floor, and she debated whether to
wake one of the servants or await her husband's help. In the end she
did neither. She disliked Mrs. Van Ostade's servants, one and all,
suspecting them of tale-bearing, and after a vain wait for Craig, who
still lingered below, she went about the business for herself. It
was a difficult matter to accomplish without rousing the house, and
when, after much travail of mind and disused muscle, she effected the
transfer of her own trunk, she was tempted to do what she could with
it and let her other belongings follow as they might. This course,
also, she rejected. Nothing except a complete evacuation would satisfy,
and she craved the joy of leaving Julie's bridal gift conspicuously
unpacked.
By three o'clock all was done, and as she flung herself wearily upon
her bed she heard Craig's leaden step mount the stair. He entered
their living-room, which, save for one or two small articles he would
scarcely miss, she had not dismantled, switched on the electricity, and
after a pause closed the door of the dressing-room connecting with the
darkened chamber where she lay. Jean heard him light a cigarette and
drop heavily into a chair, which he abandoned almost at once to pace
the floor. The sound of his pacing went on and on, varied only by the
scrape of matches as he lit cigarette after cigarette, the penetrating
oriental scent of which began in time to seep into her own room and
infect her with his unrest.
She took alarm to find him so implacable. Did his sister sway him
still? Had Julie poisoned the truth with the acid of her hate? Might
she lose him after all? She could scarcely keep herself from calling
his name. And the monotonous footfall went on and on, on and on,
trampling her heart, grinding its iteration into her sick brain. Then,
when it seemed endurable no longer, it became a sedative, and she slept
to dream that she was a new inmate of Cottage No. 6, with a tyrannous,
vindictive matron whose face was the face of Julie Van Ostade.
She stirred with the day and lay with shut eyes, tasting the blissful
reality of familiar things. This was no cell-like room, no refuge
pallet. She had only to stretch out her hand--thus--to the bed beside
her own, and touch--? Nothing! Craig's bed stood precisely as the maid
had prepared it for his coming. Was he pacing yet? She listened, but
no sound came. Creeping to the living-room door she listened again;
then turned the knob. Empty! The untouched pillows of the divan, the
overflowing ash-tray, the lingering haze, bespoke an all-night vigil.
He had not only let the sun go down upon his wrath, he had watched it
rise again! An answering glow kindled in her bruised pride.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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