Chapter 28

XXVIII

HER husband's note had briefly said:

"To-day at four o'clock. N.L."

All day she pored over the words in an agony of longing, trying
to read into them regret, emotion, memories, some echo of the
tumult in her own bosom. But she had signed "Susy," and he
signed "N.L." That seemed to put an abyss between them. After
all, she was free and he was not. Perhaps, in view of his
situation, she had only increased the distance between them by
her unconventional request for a meeting.

She sat in the little drawing-room, and the cast-bronze clock
ticked out the minutes. She would not look out of the window:
it might bring bad luck to watch for him. And it seemed to her
that a thousand invisible spirits, hidden demons of good and
evil, pressed about her, spying out her thoughts, counting her
heart-beats, ready to pounce upon the least symptom of over-
confidence and turn it deftly to derision. Oh, for an altar on
which to pour out propitiatory offerings! But what sweeter
could they have than her smothered heart-beats, her choked-back
tears?

The bell rang, and she stood up as if a spring had jerked her to
her feet. In the mirror between the dried grasses her face
looked long pale inanimate. Ah, if he should find her too
changed--! If there were but time to dash upstairs and put on a
touch of red ....

The door opened; it shut on him; he was there.

He said: "You wanted to see me?"

She answered: "Yes." And her heart seemed to stop beating.

At first she could not make out what mysterious change had come
over him, and why it was that in looking at him she seemed to be
looking at a stranger; then she perceived that his voice sounded
as it used to sound when he was talking to other people; and she
said to herself, with a sick shiver of understanding, that she
had become an "other person" to him.

There was a deathly pause; then she faltered out, not knowing
what she said: "Nick--you'll sit down?"

He said: "Thanks," but did not seem to have heard her, for he
continued to stand motionless, half the room between them. And
slowly the uselessness, the hopelessness of his being there
overcame her. A wall of granite seemed to have built itself up
between them. She felt as if it hid her from him, as if with
those remote new eyes of his he were staring into the wall and
not at her. Suddenly she said to herself: "He's suffering more
than I am, because he pities me, and is afraid to tell me that
he is going to be married."

The thought stung her pride, and she lifted her head and met his
eyes with a smile.

"Don't you think," she said, "it's more sensible-with
everything so changed in our lives--that we should meet as