Chapter 27 - Page 2

thing's not worth another word."

"Or another thought, either?" She brightened. "Promise me you won't even think of it--promise me you won't be hard on him!"

He was finding it easier to smile back at her. "Why should you think it necessary to ask my indulgence for Owen?"

She hesitated a moment, her eyes wandering from him. Then they came back with a smile. "Perhaps because I need it for myself."

"For yourself?"

"I mean, because I understand better how one can torture one's self over unrealities."

As Darrow listened, the tension of his nerves began to relax. Her gaze, so grave and yet so sweet, was like a deep pool into which he could plunge and hide himself from the hard glare of his misery. As this ecstatic sense enveloped him he found it more and more difficult to follow her words and to frame an answer; but what did anything matter, except that her voice should go on, and the syllables fall like soft touches on his tortured brain?

"Don't you know," she continued, "the bliss of waking from a bad dream in one's own quiet room, and going slowly over all the horror without being afraid of it any more? That's what I'm doing now. And that's why I understand Owen..." She broke off, and he felt her touch on his arm. "Because I'd dreamed the horror too!"

He understood her then, and stammered: "You?"

"Forgive me! And let me tell you!...It will help you to understand Owen...There were little things...little signs...once I had begun to watch for them: your reluctance to speak about her...her reserve with you...a sort of constraint we'd never seen in her before..."

She laughed up at him, and with her hands in his he contrived to say: "Now you understand why?"

"Oh, I understand; of course I understand; and I want you to laugh at me--with me! Because there were other things too...crazier things still...There was even--last night on the terrace--her pink cloak..."

"Her pink cloak?" Now he honestly wondered, and as she saw it she blushed.

"You've forgotten about the cloak? The pink cloak that Owen saw you with at the play in Paris? Yes...yes...I was mad enough for that!...It does me good to laugh about it now! But you ought to know that I'm going to be a jealous woman...a ridiculously jealous woman...you ought to be warned of it in time..."

He had dropped her hands, and she leaned close and lifted her arms to his neck with one of her rare gestures of surrender.

"I don't know why it is; but it makes me happier now to have been so foolish!"

Her lips were parted in a noiseless laugh and the tremor of her lashes made their shadow move on her cheek. He looked at her through a mist of pain and saw all her offered beauty held up like a cup to his lips; but as he stooped to it a darkness seemed to fall between them, her arms slipped from his shoulders and she drew away from him abruptly.