Shirley had turned her miserable eyes on a book-shelf along one wall. The volumes it contained had been her father’s, and among them stood a row of tomes taller than their fellows—the bound numbers of a county newspaper, beginning before the war. The back of each was stamped with the year. She was deciphering these faded imprints. “Thirty years ago,” she whispered; “yes, here it is.” She set down the candle and dragged out one of the huge leather-backs. Staggering under the weight, she rested its edge on the table and began feverishly to turn the pages, her eye on the date-line. She stopped presently with a quick breath—she had reached May 15th. The year was that of the duel: the date was the day following the jessamine [Pg 344]anniversary. Fearfully her eye overran the columns. Then suddenly she put her open hand on the page as though to blot out the words, every trace of color stricken from cheek and brow. But the line seemed to glow up through the very flesh: “Died, May 14th; Edward Sassoon, in his twenty-sixth year.” The book slipped to the floor with a crash that echoed through the room. It was true, then! It was Sassoon’s death that her mother mourned. The man in whose arms she had stood such a little while ago by the old dial of Damory Court was the son of the man who had killed him! She lifted her hands to her breast with a gesture of anguish, then dropped to her knees, buried her face on the dusty seat of one of the rickety horsehair chairs and broke into a wild burst of sobs, noiseless but terrible, that seemed to rise in her heart and tear themselves up through her breast. “Oh, God,” she whispered, “just when I was so happy! Oh, mother, mother! You loved him, and your heart broke when he died. It was Valiant who broke it—Valiant—Valiant. His father!” She slipped down upon the bare floor and crouched there shuddering and agonized, her disheveled hair wet with her tears. Was her love to be but the thing of an hour, a single clasp—and then, forever, nothing? His father’s deed was not his fault. Yet how could she love a man whose every [Pg 345]feature brought a pang to that mother she loved more than herself? So, over and over, the wheel of her thought turned in the same desolate groove, and over and over the paroxysms of grief and longing submerged her. Dawn was paling the guttering candle and streaking the sky outside before she composed herself. She rose heavily, as white as a narcissus flower, winding back her hair from her quivering face, and struggling to repress the tearless sobs that still caught stranglingly at her breath. The gray infiltrating light seemed gaunt and cruel, and the thin cheeping of waking sparrows on the lawn came to her with a haunting intolerable note of pain. Noiselessly as she had descended, she crept again up the stair. As she passed her mother’s door, she paused a moment, and laying her arms out across it, pressed her lips to the dark grain of the wood. [Pg 346] CHAPTER XL