WHAT Mr. Sable had counted on was that Gage, once away for the Convention, with his wife travelling with him, would stay away for a week or so. In any case, he had taken matters rather summarily into his own hands in the case of Freda Thorstad. The presence of the girl in the office was to him like an open scandal. He knew that she had to get out of the office and the time to get her out was while Gage was away. Of course Flandon might raise trouble when he came back but there would be no scene with the girl and he could put it flatly and finally that amours had to be conducted outside of the office if at all. He was extremely correct and secure in his own position and he felt he was most delicate.
So he was at the office a little earlier than usual the morning after Gage left for the Convention. Freda was at her desk sorting the first batch of mail. She looked very neat and capable, in her white blouse open a little at the throat, her thick golden red hair pulled back smoothly from her forehead, and her head industriously bent over her letters.
“Will you come in my office for a moment, Miss Thorstad?”
Freda followed him obediently. He closed the door and, taking his arm chair, left her standing a little dubiously before him.
“Miss Thorstad,” he said, “I think—er—that it will be best for you to sever your connection with this office.”
His tone, wholly disapproving, weighted with meaning, told his reasons with almost comic flatness.
Freda’s brow contracted and she looked sharply at him. Then she laughed. A brazen laugh, he would have said. Truly a laugh with no more fear or care or apprehension in it than the laugh of any child who comes upon something ridiculous.
Mr. Sable frowned. She was a hussy, he thought. Might try to bulldoze him a little—he became increasingly stern.
“I have no desire to go into our reasons for this but I think it will be best for you to simply leave at once. You may find the work too heavy for you. I am sure you understand that no office of this kind could take the situation differently.”
“Wouldn’t it be better for me to wait until Mr. Flandon’s return?” she asked.
He had feared that.
“Surely you understand that your presence here is embarrassing to Mr. Flandon,” he said sharply.
If she had guessed what he suspected she might have contended. But all that he said struck her as true. She evidently was being gossiped about and if it did make it embarrassing for Mr. Flandon—Perhaps that was why he had been so over courteous, to conceal a deep embarrassment.
“Very well, Mr. Sable,”—she straightened her shoulders a little—“I shall not go on with my work here.”
“Exactly.” With victory so easily accomplished, Mr. Sable became different, adept at smoothing things over. “Of course when a young lady cannot typewrite, an office like this has hardly the right kind of work—”
“I know that. I told Mr. Flandon that at the start.”
“Mr. Flandon being absent, I will give you a check for this week’s work.”
“I’ve done only one day’s work, Mr. Sable. It is only”—she calculated—“two and a half dollars.”
She took his check for that—he did not dare press the point—and left his office. Mr. Sable smoothed his little white mustache, straightened his papers with the air of having done a good day’s work already, and pressed the buzzer for his own secretary.
It was only half past nine o’clock. Freda got her hat and coat from the tiny dressing-room. Her desk was in order and there was no use in fussing over it. She wanted to get out into the clean air. The pompous little lawyer’s insinuations while they did not strike deep enough to insult her, made her feel soiled and dirty.
Cele followed her into the dressing-room.
“Where you going?”
“Going out to look for a job.”
“He let you out?”
“That’s the substance of his message.”
“Well—I call that—” Cele stopped, a veil of thought coming over her eyes. “Look here,” she went on, “if there’s anything I can do—” She stressed the last word violently, as if the need for action pressed upon her.
“Not a thing.”
“You aren’t going back to—what-you-may-call-it? The place you came from?”
“Mohawk? No—mother’s coming here in a day or two. I’ll wait, and look for a job.”
“A job,” said Cele, reflectively, “don’t worry too much, will you? Say—I’ll be around to see you to-night. I think it’s rotten.”
Freda went out, wondering if the slanderous tongues had found even Cele’s ear.
But she did not linger on thoughts of her dismissal. She was sorry to leave Mr. Flandon so, but after all heknew and understood and the whole business was so temporary anyway. Gregory should be back any day now—and they would go away and never think of such ugliness any more. It was like her that no thought of personal justification, of setting people straight on the gossip, ever entered her head. She wanted to shake them off—that was all. She wanted to get away into light and clearness and cleanness with Gregory. And it seemed to her that merely being with Gregory would make an atmosphere like that.
She had received no letter from him in five or six days now and she missed one sadly. She needed that written touch of vigor and sweetness which set her days aflame with happiness. Especially now, with the knowledge that she was probably to bear his child. The lack of an address so she might send him that delightful information was distressing. She could have reached him through his lecture bureau but she had a dread of the letter going astray if it were not sent directly to him. Not a word or thought of resentment did she allow to penetrate her love. She kept herself free from that. It was harder to keep fear away.
She was strolling along, passing through the shopping district, now and then stopping to look idly at something in the window when she heard herself greeted. Looking up she saw Ted Smillie. He was quietly affable and there seemed no escape from speaking to him.
“How are you, Freda?” he asked calmly.
She resented his use of her name though he had come to using it before their disastrous evening.
“Quite well,” she said, and looked at him evenly, waiting for him to pass her.
He did not pass. He lingered, showing in his face the return of that avid attraction which he had felt sostrongly before. She was thinner than she had been when he had seen her last and the shadows under her eyes made her face more delicate—more interesting!
“I wanted to see you again and luck’s come my way. You know that I did call on you the next day at the Brownleys’ and found you’d gone. I’m afraid I acted like an awful fool that night. Didn’t I?”
“Worse than that.”
“But it truly wasn’t my fault. I had been drinking. I know I can’t stand the stuff. And you made me quite lose my head.”
She reflected that of course it hadn’t been his fault as much as Barbara’s. And not knowing or dreaming that he was the agency which had violated the privacy of those two days at the Roadside Inn, she did not persist in great resentment. She disliked him of course but she was very idle and ready for distraction.
He went on talking, eagerly.
“It’s been on my mind ever since. I hated to let you think I was like that. Look here, Freda, I’ve got a free afternoon. Come in and have a cool drink somewhere with me—won’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Freda.
“Please.”
“I might hurt your reputation,” she said, with a scornful little laugh. “I understand I’m causing a lot of talk among your friends.”
“They always talk about every one—especially if a girl has the courage not to be conventional—”
She did not trust him in the least. Nor did she like him. It was sheer ennui which made her consent. She needed company.
They went to the tea room of a hotel, a cool place, furnished with abundant white willow and great palms. Freda had not been in such a place before and she, as ever,was esthetically responsive to the oasis of comfort and coolness it made in the sweltering city. Ted ordered for her—a tall glass of cool Russian tea with mint leaves and thin lettuce edged sandwiches. His solicitude for her comfort dulled the edge of whatever resentment she had towards him—she had never bothered to preserve much.
“And what are you doing? Did I hear you were working—like all modern women?”
“Working I was—like all women who need the money,” she answered, “but I’m not working now.”
“You’re not going back to Mohawk?”
She remembered part of his proposition that she need not go back to Mohawk, made some weeks ago, glancing at him guardedly, thinking with a certain amount of interest that this was the very young man who had made suggestions which should have barred him permanently from her presence. Here she was, taking his iced tea. Things were queer. She didn’t even feel particularly angry at him. There wasn’t any use pretending false rigors.
“I don’t know,” she said, as she had said before.
“I’m glad you left the Brownleys’ anyhow. Are you living with other friends?”
“No—I’ve a room by myself.”
Obviously he liked that and the visible signs of his liking amused her.
“Can I come to see you once in a while?”
“Oh, no, indeed. I shouldn’t in the least like you as a caller.”
He was undisturbed.
“I’ll have to make you change your mind somehow.”
She shrugged her shoulders slightly, delicately, in negation.
“Do you know how much I’ve thought about you since that night?” he asked, bending a little closer to her.
“How much?”
“All the time.”
She pushed her glass away from her.
“Don’t be silly. I’m not a half-wit, Ted. I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself. You know quite well you’re engaged to Barbara Brownley. Her mother told Miss Duffield that.”
His face darkened.
“Well,” he said, “I thought you were above a lot of silly conventions.”
She smiled serenely. “I am.”
“Then—just because a man is engaged to a woman is no reason why he should never speak to any one else.”
“No—that would put a pretty high penalty on such things, wouldn’t it?”
“People are getting over their old fashioned notions about such things. Men and women aren’t simpletons as they used to be, you know. We’re regarding these things in a modern way. More like the French,” he said largely.
“The French—oh, yes,” said Freda, gravely, “you mean having wives and mistresses too. I’ve often wondered if the French couldn’t sue us for libel for the things provincial Americans think about them.”
He flushed. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Gracious, no.” But he knew from her laugh that she was. “Why should I make fun of you?”
She was enjoying herself. She felt so secure, so strong. It was fun to bait this temperish young man, make him scuttle about for phrases which had no effect on her at all.
“Anyway you know how I feel.” He pushed aside the glasses and plates between them and bent himself over the tiny table towards her. She sat back in her chair promptly.
“You know how I feel,” he persisted, “I never cared for a girl as I’ve cared for you.”
“Then,” said Freda, with an air of great simplicity, “why not ask me to marry you?”
He threw out his hands in a theatrical gesture of despondency.
“I’m tied hand and foot. This marriage of mine has been cooked up by our families. It’s all arranged for us.”
“I know,” said Freda wisely, “as in France.”
He glanced sharply at her.
“But,” said Freda, “the modern way is not to let your parents put that sort of thing over. Truly. One simply says, ‘Mother—I will wed the girl of my choice.’”
“You are making fun of me.”
“Well—who wouldn’t?” Freda collapsed into a laugh. “Here I sit, listening to you make the funniest clandestine love in the world. You feel you’ve got to do it—to uphold your reputation as a—Frenchman! And if you slipped into a serious situation you’d be aghast. You don’t care a thing about me and you know it.”
“Ah, don’t I?” He looked for a moment as if he did.
“You probably care a little about corrupting me. Now look here, Ted, please stop talking such nonsense. You can’t shock me and it’s pretty hard to insult me—I am a little ashamed of not being more insulted—but you probably could make me very angry by persisting in trying to involve me in petty vice. In the first place I don’t like it. In the second place, if I ever went in for vice, it would be on a larger scale than you could dream of. I haven’t the slightest intention of—being French! You’d better go along and make love to Bob Brownley. She’ll bring some excitement into your life, I think. The reason I’m not more angry with you is that you were,indirectly, the cause of the greatest bit of luck that ever happened to me.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t dream of telling you. But I’m awfully obliged for the tea—truly. It set me up. Shall we go?”
He was not so easy to repulse. He got up and pulled his chair around to her side of the table.
“Freda,” he tried to take her hand, “if I gave up Bob would you let me see you?”
“I wouldn’t if you gave up the world.”
She rose a little impatiently, feeling that this was going too far, and started for the door of the dining-room.
“At least you’ll tell me where you live?” he pressed her. “Let me go home with you now.”
“Don’t you have to work in the middle of the afternoon?”
“Nobody’s working much. It’s too hot.”
“Then go play with Barbara. I’ve other things to do.”
Possibly it was the heat and the sense of effort which got nowhere that made Ted’s face intense and angry. He saw her about to slip away again.
“You can’t go like this, Freda, I’ve only just found you.”
“You’d better let me,” answered Freda, “because I see Maud Dubonnet looking at you and she knows you and obviously isn’t intending to speak to me though I lunched at her house, so you see it will be hot with you when Barbara hears this.”
Against his will Ted looked up and saw Maud truly, with two other girls and three young men coming into the room. They had to pass Ted and Freda as they stood there, discussing. Maud Dubonnet was the only one of the group whom Freda knew. The others all evidently knew Ted and glanced at him with some interest. Mauddid not look at Freda. She held her head stiffly as she passed, then said something to the others which made them turn with an attempt at casualness to look at the man and girl. Ted delayed no longer. He followed Freda out.
“You see it doesn’t pay to do things Barbara won’t like. This will get back to her before to-morrow and she won’t be pleasant.”
Ted’s mouth set in an rather ugly line.
“I’ll manage Bob all right.” He looked at Freda. Her face under the plain white hat she wore was mocking, insubordinate, fascinating. “But I want to see you again. To-night?”
“Nonsense. Good-by, Ted. Be good and make your peace with Bob.”
She turned and went in the opposite direction from the one in which they had started, going into the first big department store and retiring to the ladies’ waiting-room where she wrote a letter to her father, and mailed it. Then, having made sure she was rid of Ted she went home. The afternoon dragged along. She read and thought and on an impulse went out again to go to the railway station and get some time tables. She wanted to see just how far Gregory had been away from her when he last wrote.
Each time the postman approached the house there was a leap of her heart. Four times a day he came and each time he brought fresh hope. She would play tricks on herself as she went down to look in the mail box she shared with the people who rented the apartment in which she stayed. Each time she put her hand in the box she hesitated before she looked, then looked quickly as if to catch fate before it tricked her. But it would be an advertisement of a corset firm for Mrs. Miller, an envelope with unmistakable savor of a bill about it, a postcard, awhite Louisine envelope with a woman’s handwriting on it. How she hated all the flatness of the Miller mail.
Each envelope she took in her hands seemed to be mischievously metamorphosed into one of these stupid envelopes which represented such dull contact with the outside world. Nothing to do but to go upstairs and read all over again the old messages of love from him—to wear her wedding ring in the privacy of her room—to make endless computations on the presumable date of her child’s birth—to read with unfailing zest and yet slight nausea the rather mawkish pages of “What Every Mother Should Know” which she had shamefacedly but defiantly bought at a book shop, feeling the necessity for some practical knowledge of marriage.
The next day, breaking through her apprehension and her waiting, cutting across her vague fears, came the letter. It lay between an announcement of the opening of a new hair dressing parlor and Mr. Miller’s water and light bill. How could she hope that the other white envelope would be anything more interesting? Then she turned it over and the address stared at her blackly. It was addressed to Mrs. Gregory Macmillan, in an unfamiliar hand, postmarked at the town from which Gregory had last written. Gregory always addressed her letters to Freda Thorstad to avoid any explanations to the Millers. A quick faint fear came over her. She almost crushed the letter as she flew up the stairs and with her back against her door faced the envelope again.
Then steeling her mind and her heart, presenting only outer senses to what blow it might contain, she opened it. The written words made their sense clear, like some amazingly vital story that thrilled every nerve.
“My dear Mrs. Macmillan:I obtained your address from your husband and I am writing you to tell you that he is extremely ill. We have done our best for him and he has a nurse with him constantly but I feel that you should come to him if it is at all possible. I do not know what responsibilities of family may hold you but I think it my duty to inform you that your husband is very sick. He lectured here on the fourteenth and the next morning the proprietor of this hotel called me to attend him. I found him in the first stages of typhoid and had him removed to a hospital here which is comfortable and where we have given him every attention. At a time like this his family should be with him. I regret that I must be the agent of such distressing news.Faithfully yours,L. D. Merritt, M.D.”
“My dear Mrs. Macmillan:
I obtained your address from your husband and I am writing you to tell you that he is extremely ill. We have done our best for him and he has a nurse with him constantly but I feel that you should come to him if it is at all possible. I do not know what responsibilities of family may hold you but I think it my duty to inform you that your husband is very sick. He lectured here on the fourteenth and the next morning the proprietor of this hotel called me to attend him. I found him in the first stages of typhoid and had him removed to a hospital here which is comfortable and where we have given him every attention. At a time like this his family should be with him. I regret that I must be the agent of such distressing news.
Faithfully yours,L. D. Merritt, M.D.”
She read it through twice carefully. The thing struck her as quite unreal, although she had speculated on the possibility of his illness.
Then her mind, working reasonably, went on. She thought of trains and money. She had fifty—no forty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents. It wasn’t enough, she knew.
She had the time tables which she had obtained the day before. She studied them, her body held tautly, her face calm, showing a control which had come unconsciously. She could leave at three fifteen that afternoon. She’d have to change trains at midnight. She’d get there at noon next day. There was money. She must have money. No one to get it from unless she wired her father—better not—Miss Duffield away—Mr. Flandon away—Cele had none. She thought even of Ted Smillie. Better not—she’d pawn something. That was what people did when they needed money.
Like most girls she had a small collection of semi-precious jewelry—nothing of great value. She openedthe little mock-ivory box on her dressing table and considered the contents carefully. Then she closed it, put on her hat and stuck the box in her pocket.
Pawning was unlike any experience she had ever had and not as exciting as books had led her to believe. She felt no shame—only a vague hostility to the pawnbroker. She hated his having so obviously the best of the transaction. He was scornful in her array of articles to sell—the gold bracelet that had cost her father thirty-five dollars—the little one carat diamond ring that had been her mother’s—the opal ring—the seal ring—the little silver locket.
In the end he gave her thirty-three dollars, and with the money in her hands she immediately got his point of view. She had exchanged a lot of things which meant little to her for the boundless power of thirty-three dollars which added to forty-nine made eighty-two.
She bought a ticket to Fairmount, Montana. It cost her twenty-eight dollars and sixty-four cents. She put it in her purse and went home, a splendid sense of action stirring her.
It took her a very short time to pack her bag. There remained two hours before the train. She spent it sitting in her room and letting the knowledge of what she was doing penetrate her mind. It occurred to her that she should let some one know where she was going but in the face of Gregory’s illness it seemed even less possible to confide the news of her marriage. That was to have been a glorious revelation to a few people. She could not turn it into tragedy, so she decided to tell no one.
To her father she wrote a letter.
Yet even to him she could not tell the facts. It seemed now when circumstances seemed to imperil her secret that she clutched it even more tightly to herself. She could not bear the thought of comment breaking in like adestructive barrage on the secret glory and beauty she cherished. In her absorption she did not think much of consequences or possible worry for any one. Only as she told Mrs. Miller that she wanted to pay up for her week and that she had been called out of town, did it occur to her from a comment of Mrs. Miller’s, that her mother was coming in a day or two. The complication puzzled her—then she overrode it boldly. It was one of the things that had to be. So she wrote a note for her mother and entrusted it to Mrs. Miller. It was only a few lines to tell her that she had left the city—“I’m sorry that I can’t be more definite about my plans. There’s nothing to worry you, mother. It’s quite all right and I’m not doing anything I shouldn’t. So please don’t worry about me. Only trust me, won’t you? I know you will.” She sent her love and for all her assurances on paper that she knew her mother would trust her she sealed it with a dubious look.
In the letter to her father she was, if not more informative, at least more expansive.
It was incoherent, reassuring, happy, sad—the kind of letter that carries with it great fear to the one who reads it and who sees how delicate the balance is on which the future is being weighed.
Freda mailed the note to her father, left the one for her mother with Mrs. Miller and went to the station. Almost before she knew it the long train, with a jerk of its loose hung body had gathered itself together and moved out of the yards through the scattering, blackened railroad district. She watched the little houses and let her mind sink into a blur of remembrance and anticipation. She was going to Gregory. No more waiting for letters, no more dreams. Whatever it was that was to come, it was reality—something to feel and to do—not to wait for.
She slipped her wedding ring on her finger and displayed her hand a little absurdly on the edge of the window casing. Marvelous symbol—that ring, she thought. Too bad that people had come to regard it so disdainfully. How ill it must have been treated to have sunk into such disrepute. Across the aisle of the day coach she saw a like ring on the hand of a woman. It was a fleshy hand and the coarse pink skin pushed itself up on either side of the encircling band but Freda felt kinship and friendliness. With this unknown woman, with the unintelligent face she almost felt it possible to converse intimately—as if she might cross to her and say, “I am Mrs. Gregory Macmillan. Are you going far?”
When the shadows fell thick across the prairie and a white-coated waiter, a shade more important in his manner that he had been in passing through the Pullmans, had intrigued a fair number of the day-coach passengers into the diner, Freda rose a little stiffly. Her chin had red marks on it where she had cupped it in her hand for so long and there were streaks of coal dust under her eyes. She made a perfunctory and inadequate attempt to look presentable and faced a new adventure. She had never eaten on a train in her life.
The warm bustle and luxury of the place stirred her senses and brought her out of her lonely rhapsody into an appreciation of what went on around her. The adventure spirit came to the surface. Freda Thorstad—sitting at a tidy table in a dining-car, on the way to her husband. There was no disloyalty to Gregory’s illness that she could not resist the enchantment of shining dishes which looked like silver and warm and savory smells and smiling, interesting travelers, with above and around it all the clatter and rush of the train, moving on to a hundred destinations, a hundred tragedies and comediesand romances. Her thoughts at least admitted no staleness as a possibility.
The meal stood out in her memory. She never forgot it. Tentatively she ordered, tea, biscuits and lamb chops. When the lamb chops came they lay on a platter with little sprigs of parsley offering them up and made her very hungry. They looked delightful but inadequate. She ate hungrily, for these last few days she had had little food.
Four—five—dragging hours. She bought a magazine with a flaring girl on its cover and read avidly, her mind sinking into its soporific fiction with weariness, getting respite from her own sharp and vivid thoughts.
The conductor came to tell her that this was her station. He lifted her heavy bag for her and carried it to the foot of the steps of the coach.
Then came the excitement of the swoop and pause of the Flyer. Freda was bundled aboard, hat awry, nervously watching for her bag, taken from her hands by some one, porter or conductor. The curtains swung from all the berths. The porter’s voice was low and lazy. He showed her to lower six—a little cubby hole with curtains drawn aside, revealing the delightful neatness of the berth. Freda knew even less of sleeping on trains than she did of eating there. Awkwardly she managed to undress and crept in between the thick white sheets. In the darkness she lay awake, wondering. Wondering at the rush and sound and the mysteries shrouded behind green swinging curtains. When the train shrieked a signal or stopped lurchingly at some station she pushed up the curtain beside her and, propped on her pillows, lay looking into the night tasting the full delight of inexperience. At last she fell asleep and dreamed of Gregory. It was a frightening dream. He did not knowwho she was, did not remember her. Towards dawn she pushed her way out of it and woke up to see the rain falling lightly over the even country and to realize that she was begrimed with the coal dust and sticky with heat.
At noon she reached Fairmount and stood in the station looking about her for information. The excitement of the last lap and approaching climax of her journey overcame her fatigue and her eyes were brilliant. She decided to take a taxi to the hospital and chose at random one from a row of disheveled looking “For Hire” machines waiting for the daily debouch of passengers from the Flyer. She climbed in with her bag and closed the shaky door, and the driver started his motor. Freda’s heart was racing. The cab could not go fast enough—nor slow enough. It seemed to her as if she could not bear what might be waiting of joy or sorrow, as if emotion was welling up so strong that it would burst its bounds and overcome her. Through the dusty cab windows she saw Fairmount—ill developed wooden houses with unhealthy looking trees giving little shade—a business district of twelve or fifteen squares with all the machinery of business being conducted as it was at this hour in hundreds of other First National Banks and Gilt Edge Stores and Greek Restaurants and brick office buildings. The cab whisked through it rapidly and came to a section of broader streets where more impressive looking houses of brick or stone appeared at leisurely intervals. A little park with a dusty looking playground adjoining it. A row of apartments and there on the corner where a “Silent Zone” sign, awry and disregarded by a group of boys playing in the street made a vain appeal, was St. Agatha’s Hospital.
Inside the little entry was an office with three or fourglass windows, behind which she looked for an informant. A slim, weary looking nun came at last, looking at her from behind steel rimmed glasses without curiosity.
“Macmillan—yes,” she said, “you’re—?”
“I’m his wife.”
The nun accepted the fact simply and as if she yielded Freda certain rights and privileges. Freda felt frightened. She wanted to go into Gregory’s room, kneel down by his bed and tell him to get well. She could see it wasn’t going to be as direct as that.
A buzzing, muffled bell, sounded by the nun, had summoned a nurse, who came into the office thumping heavily on her flat rubber-heeled shoes. She was commissioned to take Freda to the last room in corridor “A”—the “typhoid case.” Freda left her bag in the office and followed the nurse, as she clumped indifferently along. The presence of the nurse bothered her. She wanted to get rid of her—tell her she would go on alone but she did not dare. In corridor “A” the nurse gave her a chair.
“I’ll find his nurse and see if you can see him now.”
“I’m his wife,” said Freda.
The nurse nodded.
“I’ll get the nurse first. She wouldn’t like me to bring any one in without calling her first, you see.” She smiled a little as she explained this convention of the hospital and her smile angered Freda. It seemed an intrusion.
Gregory’s nurse came to her. She held out a friendly hand.
“I’m glad you’ve come. We’re doing our best but I was glad when the doctor wrote you,” she said simply.
Something in her tone pricked the adventure spirit in Freda. It lay flat, useless, a bit of torn balloon. She saw herself as this other woman saw her—a wife, come in time of stress to a sick husband, not a lover to a meeting.That was what she herself had colored her worry with.
Panic seized her. She followed almost resistingly. The door, with its printed “No Visitors” sign was opened softly. She had to accustom her eyes to the darkness. A smell of disinfectants, clean and pungent, came to her. There was the bed, white and high. She made her way towards it falteringly. The head, bandaged for coolness, did not turn to her. It was only when she stood by the bedside that it moved a little, restlessly. He did not look real to her, not like himself.
“Gregory,” she said mechanically.
His fever-dulled eyes looked up at her—lighted. He made one motion permeating his whole body as if he would rise in spite of the quickly detaining hand of the nurse.
“Angel,” he said huskily, “you angel of God—Freda.”
The sound of his voice was a release. All her frightened feelings, reassured, warmed into life, flooded Freda. She sank down by his side, her head bent over the hot hand, which lay so impotent on the gray blanket.
THE Convention went on as Gage had predicted. It held few surprises. Here and there a wave of new sentiment was perceptible but the old rules held good. The tremendous heat was a factor. It made many of the delegates relapse very easily into the political fatalism which is the breath of life to party control.
To the women it was more interesting and more disappointing than it was to the men. They were interested because it was all new. They were disappointed because every one seemed to give in to the obvious so readily. Harriet Thompson and her group were somewhat grim—humorous enough. They had not expected anything else really.
It was an exhausting week. There was a threat that the Convention might go over into the succeeding week but that was unfulfilled. Saturday night Margaret and Helen went back to St. Pierre too tired and worn to even talk much to each other, thoughtful, depressed a little and revolving new enthusiasms at the same time. But now that they were emerging from the impersonal world in which they had been they felt the pressure of the personal responsibilities they both were speeding toward, perhaps, for they sat in silence in their compartment, each full of her own reflections. Younger and less experienced women would have welcomed the egotism of their own visions—the anticipations of scenes in which they would be central. Helen and Margaret, fresh from the lift ofexperience which was largely intellectual, did not look anticipative, or particularly happy.
Helen had wired Gage that she was coming and he met her at the station. One glance at his dark face told her all she needed to know of his mood. He took her bags, not offering to kiss her and she and Margaret, oddly constrained, got into the waiting car. Margaret was dropped at her apartment and there, at the door, Gage vouchsafed his only conversation. He asked them briefly if they “were satisfied with the show” and his voice was heavy with ridicule.
“I think we were,” said Helen, “we didn’t expect as much as you did, perhaps, Gage.”
A light answer, ringing sharply. Margaret went into her room and flung open the windows to air it. At the window she looked down the street but the Flandon motor had disappeared.
Helen kept wishing that it were not Sunday. Sunday was such a long, intimate, family day. She meant to have been very definite with herself about what her mode of approach to Gage would be. She found herself floundering again. Of course there could be no compromise now. This business with this girl had to be sifted through, admitted—faced. She supposed there was nothing at all left of any feeling for Gage. He had been outrageous and, even as she thought that, she worried about him. He did look so very badly. Other people must be noticing it too.
He said nothing. At the house he helped her out and went into the house with her. She sought the children. They were delightful and welcoming, full of questions, of tales about the fun they had while she was away, eager for presents. Helen kept the children with her, nervously, postponing the encounter with Gage, wishing he would go down to the city. But he did not. He hungabout, ominous, smoking, reading, yet not reading with absorption, suddenly throwing book or paper aside and restlessly trying some new one, watching Helen.
She was pent up. There was such a contrast between the easy interchange of yesterday and the constraint of to-day. The house didn’t seem big enough to hold her and Gage. She went about her work trying to be normal, directing the maids, playing with the children, unpacking her bags. All the time she felt him watching her even if she were not in the same room, felt his brooding concentration on her, knew he was wondering what she thought about, whether she was glad to be back, what she was going to do about Freda Thorstad. For the first time in her married life, she had the sense of marriage as a trap. It had never been that. There were times when she had been a little restive, but she had always been building on a rock of belief in marriage, joy in it. It was different to-day. She felt as if she had come in out of the fresh air of clean discourse, free intercourse, into a narrow room where she was shut up with a growling man—a room heavy with discord, enmity, suspicion.
The morning passed somehow. They had finished dinner and she was waiting for Gage to propose something. He usually took the children for country drives on Sunday. They were in the big sunroom, shady now with its awnings let down, and Helen was stretched out on a white willow chaise longue trying to believe she was ridiculous and making mountains out of molehills when a maid came in to announce a caller.
“There’s a lady and gentleman to see Mr. Flandon.”
“You hear, Gage?”
“Who is it?” asked Gage.
“I think it’s a lady who’s been here before.”
Gage’s face was interested. He rose from his chair and followed the maid. Helen heard a brief colloquy ofvoices then Gage saying, “Come out here where my wife is, Mrs. Thorstad.”
He reappeared through the French doors with the little Mohawk lady behind him, and behind her a man, a rather stooping, pleasant-faced gentleman with well poised head and an air of mingled anxiety and embarrassment. His manner was unlike that of his wife which was definite, sharp, assertive, even before she spoke. As she saw them Helen had the quick perception of a crisis. The parents of this girl here together could mean only complications of trouble. Her mind stiffened itself for whatever might be coming, as she rose and greeted Mrs. Thorstad with easy cordiality and accepted the introduction to her husband graciously.
“Did you enjoy the convention? I didn’t see you again after Wednesday.”
“No,” answered Mrs. Thorstad, “I came up to St. Pierre on Friday night.”
She seated herself in the chair Gage brought for her, a little uneasily, with a righteous wriggle of her thin body. Her husband and Gage stood together exchanging a few commonplace remarks. The air was electric.
Surprisingly, it was Mr. Thorstad who began.
“We are sorry to intrude upon you on this Sunday afternoon but our errand is pressing and it will be best to make it clear at once. My daughter has been employed in your office, Mr. Flandon.”
“Yes?”
“My wife came from Chicago to pay her a brief visit. She found that Freda had gone away, leaving no address with any one. We are very much concerned—greatly disturbed. My wife went at once to your office and there saw your partner—Mr. Sable, is it?” Gage inclined his head—“You were not there. I believe Freda was directly in your employ. Mr. Sable tells my wifethat Freda resigned her place on Friday morning. Questioning him we find that she was asked to resign—that,” he paused and spoke with difficulty, though still calmly, “that rumors subversive to her character have been afloat. She has disappeared, Mr. Flandon.” The stoop in his shoulders had somehow straightened. He was as tall as Gage as he looked at him with restraint and yet with indictment. “Do you know where my daughter is, Mr. Flandon?”
He stopped. Mrs. Thorstad edged to the side of her chair, foot tapping nervously on the floor, eyes on Gage. Helen’s eyes were on him too, though there was no change in her attitude. She had not paled or flushed. It might have been the most casual of conversations.
The second before Gage’s answer weighed on all of them. He looked as if he were pondering something—then back at Mr. Thorstad. His voice was even and controlled.
“No, Mr. Thorstad, I don’t know where your daughter is.”
“Why did she leave your office?”
“She was discharged by my partner in my absence, most unjustly, for preposterous suspicions. I shall do my best to reinstate her.”
“It will not be necessary, sir.”
Mrs. Thorstad could bear it no longer.
“And what were these suspicions?” She waited for no answer, turning quickly on Helen. “I went to see Mrs. Brownley to find out if she could tell me and her attitude is most peculiar—most peculiar. She insinuated that I should give up my work to keep watch over my daughter. She cast reflections on me as a mother. I told her that I had always upheld the strictest doctrines of the home and the family, that I had always insisted on a moral purity before everything else. That I shouldbe so treated amazed me! My daughter has always had the strictest upbringing. What ideas of modern license she had absorbed from contact with this Miss Duffield I am sure I don’t know. I always objected to that woman. I asked Miss Duffield about it this morning. She doesn’t know where Freda is—at least, she says she doesn’t. Well—who does? You took her into your office, Mr. Flandon, you exposed her to this gossip—”
“Please, Adeline—”
“I need not tell you, Mr. Thorstad, that this unwarranted action of my partner has incensed me beyond measure. I have the greatest respect for your daughter.”
Mr. Thorstad inclined his head a little.
“We wish to find her, Mr. Flandon. We are greatly disturbed. My daughter went away of her own free will, according to a letter I had from her. She was evidently drawn by some enthusiasm of emotion.”
“She wrote you that?”
“To that effect.”
Mrs. Thorstad broke in again.
“Even before your wife, Mr. Flandon, I think we should tell you that we know that your name has been coupled with our daughter’s name. Mr. Sable let us infer it. I’m sorry, Mrs. Flandon—”
She did not look sorry. She looked vindictive.
“I know,” said Helen, “I believe, Gage, that you could throw some light on all this. I don’tknowthat you could but Miss Thorstad’s parents should be relieved of anxiety if possible.”
Gage looked at his wife. Her eyes met his levelly, seemingly void of feeling, empty even of anger. Her resistance to pain woke admiration—then cruelty. So that was all she cared, was it? New woman—modern stuff!
“I do not know where Miss Thorstad is,” he repeated,“I think, however, that a girl with her strength and control is safe wherever she may be. She may think it best to keep her plans to herself for the time being—”
“You speak with curious confidence, Mr. Flandon,” said Mrs. Thorstad sharply. “This matter involves my daughter’s reputation.”
“From what I have seen of your daughter she is above gossip,” answered Gage. He turned to the other man. “I am sorry I cannot help you. I am more sorry than I can say that she was treated unfairly in my office and I shall do my best to adjust that. If I should hear from her of course you will be informed.”
Mr. Thorstad looked a little tired. He had perhaps keyed himself to this encounter and found it exhausting to have it end in futility.
“I shall pursue my inquiries, of course. It is not a matter which we care to have handled through any ordinary channels of search as we are informed by her that she left voluntarily. It may be that she will communicate with me to-morrow.”
An embarrassed pause came.
“Come, Adeline,” said her husband, still initiative.
Mrs. Thorstad felt and looked frustrated. She frowned at him, tight lips compressed. It was clear that she was neither pleased nor satisfied, that she wished to ferret further and the presence of her husband restrained her.
“The affair shall be probed,” she said somewhat absurdly.
“You mustn’t go out in this heat without a cool drink. Let me give you a glass of lemonade, won’t you?”
Helen rang the bell before Mrs. Thorstad could protest.
“It’s very good of you, Mrs. Flandon,” she subsided, stiffly.
Gage seized his opportunity.
“I’ll get you a real drink, Thorstad. Come out in the dining-room, won’t you?”
Mr. Thorstad, on the point of refusal, checked himself. Gage’s face was significant. He wanted to see him alone.
In the dining-room they were out of earshot. Gage poured two small glasses of whisky, his companion’s restraining hand dictating the amount. Even then Mr. Thorstad waited. He raised his glass perfunctorily but did not drink.
“I’m sorry for this mess, Thorstad. I don’t believe in taking notice of gossip ordinarily and you can’t help what a lot of small people think. But I saw something of your daughter in my office. I admired her character, her idealism immensely. I—am not involved in any way with her. I believe wherever she is that she is happy—and safe.”
“Did she leave the city because of that dismissal from your office?”
Gage strode up and down the room.
“That’s it! I don’t know. It might be. I was in Chicago. My partner took it on himself to let her go. How deeply he wounded her I don’t know. I was appalled when I heard what he had done. I am going to make reparation to her in some way, I assure you. It’s the sort of thing that is hard to repair but I shall do my best when I know where she is.”
“Why did they talk about her in connection with you, Flandon, if there’s nothing to it?”
“Fools. I shan’t contradict them.”
“It might be wise to contradict them.”
“No.” A gleam of hysteria was in Gage’s smile. “Let them say what they please as long as it doesn’t hurt Miss Thorstad.”
“It may do that.”
“Then we stop it. But there’s no point in statements now that there is no possible connection between our names. The thing is to find her if you feel she ought not to be left alone.”
“Why should she be left alone? She may be in distress.”
“I don’t think so,” Gage was guarding Freda’s secret as best he could and trying to reassure her father who so inspired sympathy and respect. “She is so controlled—so high minded that she would act wisely, I’m sure.”
Mr. Thorstad looked at him curiously.
“Then you have no further information?”
“No—only I hope you’ll take my word that I’m not involved.”
“I am inclined to do so.” Mr. Thorstad put down his untasted glass on the table and accepted Gage’s outstretched hand. “I do not feel exactly as her mother does about the matter. Of course Mrs. Thorstad is actuated by a mother’s great anxiety. I am a little more inclined to trust to Freda’s judgments. She is, as you say, not a person to be the victim of any easy emotion or to yield to any false persuasion. She has great perception of the alliance between true things and beautiful things.”
“I saw that,” said Gage. “You’re very wise, Mr. Thorstad. It’s too bad she can’t be left alone to work this out.”
“Personally,” went on the other, “the scandal doesn’t perturb me at all. It is for her mother’s sake that I feel obliged to overstep my own inclination to let Freda have her own time to make her confidence. I felt it necessary to trace any possible connection you might have with her disappearance. I—I am apt to take the word of a gentleman as truth, Mr. Flandon.”
“You are very good,” said Gage. “Very good. I am deeply grateful.”
“Shall we return to the others?”
The two women were sitting silently, making no pretense at casual talk, their curiosity as to what the two men had said to each other indisguisable.
“We must go now, Adeline.”
She rose, evidently torn by a desire to be easy and complaisant and a disgruntled lack of satisfaction in the interview.
“Very well,” she said, “I’m sure I shall not be able to rest for a second until my daughter is safe and with me once more.”
They were courteous to the little outbreak of melodrama but not too responsive.
Helen and Gage accompanied their visitors to the door and saw them walk down the street, the sunlight bringing out the shiny seams in Mr. Thorstad’s coat, beating unmercifully on the defiant little daisies in his wife’s hat.
Helen turned to her husband.
“Why didn’t I hear of this?”
“I didn’t know you’d be interested. You’ve been so interested in national affairs I couldn’t suppose you had time for little local troubles.”
She set her lips in anger.
“You gain nothing by viciousness, Gage. Where is that girl?”
“Haven’t I said I didn’t know?”
“I don’t believe you.”
“That’s quite in line with your other theories of wifely conduct.”
“I’m not interested in quarreling with you, Gage. I simply want to know for my own protection what is going on. Is it true that George Sable discharged that girl while you were away?”
“Quite true.”
“For what reason?”
Gage lighted a swaggering cigarette.
“His mind runs along with yours, Helen. He had the same delicate ideas you have.”
“Where did the girl go?”
“Didn’t you hear me say I didn’t know?”
“Has she run away from you too? Have you got that girl into trouble?”
“I always hated that phrase,” answered Gage, nonchalantly.
“Why did you come back from Chicago so soon?”
“Why should I stay? A fifth wheel? The entirely superfluous husband of one of the great feminist successes?”
“I asked you why you came back.” She framed each word with an artificial calmness.
“You haven’t taken so much interest in me for years, Helen. It’s true, isn’t it? All a man has to do is to get involved in a scandal to have the women after him.”
She pressed her hand to her face as if to shut out the sight of him.
“You’re a madman, Gage.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Then she dropped into a chair, weeping long sobs, drawn from emotion controlled beyond her strength.
“Why do you torture me so, Gage? What devil possesses you?”
He had always had a horror of seeing her weep. He took a step towards her.
“I’m tired—I’m tired,” sobbed Helen.
Gage stiffened. “And why are you tired? Because you’ve been running around Chicago. I didn’t tire you. You tire yourself. Then you come back exhausted andblame me because you are exhausted. If you were more a wife—less a public character—”
She had risen and stood looking at him angrily again, eyes wide with hurt and disappointment.
“You jealous fool—you’re on the point of becoming a degenerate. If even Sable has to watch over your actions—publicly reprove you—”
“He won’t do it again,” said Gage, “not again. I am severing my connection with the upright Sable. He’ll never pry into my business again. I’ll tell you that for certain.”
She stopped considering the personal trouble in sheer amazement.
“You’re not going to break with Sable?”
“I told him yesterday I was through. In fact I told him cordially to go to hell. He can’t play the black mammy to me, you know.”
“But—what are you to do?”
“Oh, I’ll do something. I’ll show him whether I have to sit and take dictation from him.”
“You’re going to practice by yourself?”
“When my plans are ready, you’ll hear them, Helen.”
She shivered.
“I wonder if you’re headed for destruction.”
“You told me I was a degenerate. Well, we’ll see.”
Looking at him she saw, underneath the mask of tawdry control, the agitation he was in and the ravages of nervousness. His eyes were not steady—they were too bright and he had a way of biting at his lower lip which she could not remember.
She straightened her hair mechanically and went past him toward the sunroom. As she went she heard him return to the dining-room and stood with clenched hands trying not to interfere until she had thought things out.
Lying down in the same chair she had occupied beforeshe tried to get some order into her thoughts. The problem of Freda, so overwhelmingly great a moment ago, was matched if not overcome by her realization that Gage was going from bad to worse—that he seemed to be on the loose mentally—tearing from catastrophe to catastrophe. The significance of a quarrel with Sable grew upon her—the probability of all the financial trouble that Gage might be letting himself in for. And the thing that she came back to time after time as her thoughts went around in circles was that Gage did not seem to care any more—that he was so recklessly indifferent to what she thought—to what was wise for the children and for her.
For the moment she had passed beyond the point of thinking of rights and wrongs. She was concentrated on immediate necessities. She almost forgot the complication of Freda and was shocked at herself when that came back to her.
She heard the sound of Gage’s car starting down the driveway. He was going out then. All her feelings, her thoughts bore on one question. Where was he going?
AFTER the first twenty-four hours with Gregory nothing seemed real to Freda outside of the hospital. She had found for herself a hotel room, a shabby little room in a second rate hotel, a room with scarred brown maple bureau and iron bed from which the paint had peeled. It looked out on a fire escape and a narrow court, helplessly trapped between tall brick walls.
To that room she went for her periods of rest, for the hospital had no vacant room or even bed, where she might relax. After she had gone to the hotel from the hospital several times the way seemed curiously familiar. Two blocks to the east, across the street car line, past the drug store with its structure of Tanlac in the window—one block to the north and there was the entrance of the hotel with seven or eight broad cement steps leading up to it. There was not one thing which she passed which impressed itself in the least on her imagination—not one image that was vivid enough to penetrate. Night and day it was the same—like moving blindfolded through still air. It was only when she went back to the hospital that her mind seemed to stir from its lethargy.
The hardest moments were those of Gregory’s lucidity—when the sight of her made him flame with a passion which leapt through his restricted and suffering body, when phrases came to his hot lips which made her quiver with the sense of him. She would kneel beside his bed and tell him softly reassuring things and with his head turned on his pillow he would regard her from the depthsof those eyes, always haggardly set, but now far sunken.
She had no faintest doubts as to her past or present actions. That was Freda’s great triumph over most of the women she knew. She did not doubt; she did not worry. Most of them had carried over into their new self-confidence and their new chances a habit of worry born of ingrowing responsibilities in the past and now fostered by general self-consciousness. It was unnatural to Freda to mope over her actions or to analyze them. She knew how to go ahead and there always was absence of self-consciousness about what she did, simplicity of manner, dignity of step. It was as if she had somehow stepped over the phase of altercation, doubt and experiment into a manner which did the unusual easily, but only if the unusual came in her path, which accepted new rules, new customs without a flush, and most of all was able to merge the best of feminism into a fine yet unchristened ease of sex. She did not need either the little fears or defenses of her mother or the larger ones of Margaret Duffield. It did not occur to her that she was very complete in herself and satisfying to herself. She bothered with no altercations or analysis.
It was not a wholly sad time for all the deepening anxiety and danger—it was not a time for depression. Freda knew that she had come to grips with life and she was glad to feel her full strength called to battle.
While they wondered about her in St. Pierre, while her name ran like a little germ of gossip spreading contagion from lip to lip in St. Pierre, she sat most of the time in the hospital, in the chair beside Gregory’s bed, touching his hot, tense wrist with the coolness of her fingers—she sat outside his room in the recess of the bay windows on a curved window seat and watched people come and go—and once in a while she slipped into the hospital library and got hold of a book on pregnancy which fascinatedher. Skillfully manipulated conversation with the nurse had given her enough information so that she had been able to control a great part of her own present liability to sickness and she felt better than she had for several weeks.
Three days after her arrival Gregory came successfully through the first crisis of his illness. Freda walked on air the next day. The doctor was cheerful and jocose.
“We’ll have that young Irishman of yours out of the woods in ten days,” he said to Freda, and she had no doubt of it.
The difficulty was not in the progress of the disease but in Gregory’s own debility. He was not so well a few days later. The doctor talked gravely of exhaustion and Freda picked up from the reluctant nurse that exhaustion during the third week was dangerous—that one might die because of it.
For the first time she was fearful. Here was nothing you could combat for him. Here was a slow slipping away. He did not often talk now. Almost all the time he lay, incredibly thin, mournfully haggard against his pillow, too tired even for Freda to call back.
She thought about death. One day she passed a room in which a man was dying. She heard the raucous gasp from the filling lungs and trembled. They brought a priest. She wondered. If Gregory should die, would he too have a priest to guide him out? She supposed that usually you sent for a minister or priest. A month before the mere suggestion that a soul needed ushering into immortality would have seemed absurd to her healthy pagan young mind, but now, with the severing of the thread so possible, with the limits of the unknown receding even while they grew close she wondered. Gregory was not formally religious but in his poems he had seemed so conscious of God.
“Most poets write of women—but you write only of God and Ireland.” So she had said to him, she remembered, and he had answered.
“I shall write of woman now, dear heart.”
She went softly to his door. No change. Well, she should go to the hotel for an hour—But the nurse stopped her.
“Mrs. Macmillan, he is not so well. The doctor thinks these next twelve hours will be the worst. If you wish to leave I think it will be all right. If not, I can see that you get a supper tray and if he is better in the night you can take my cot.”
Freda felt a strange chill rushing over her.
“I’ll stay.” She looked at Gregory. “Worse? He looks just the same.”
“He is weaker—”
The stillness of the phrase—the helplessness. She sat down in the chair by him again. It seemed so absurd not to call him back—so impotent. He looked unguarded. If—if he should die he would go—wherever it was—there must be a future for a soul like Gregory’s somewhere—he would go alone. Cruel. She thought of the child growing within her. How much more gentle was birth than death. Gentle and gradual and kind. It was shared, but this horrible singleness of dying—
She had supper in the nurse’s kitchen. The nurses were kind to her, faintly curious, preoccupied, full of that gayety so characteristic of nurses when for an hour they can slip out of the technique of the manner which they affect and become informal, unrestrained. The shadow of Gregory’s crisis rested on them not at all, Freda thought. She was not resentful. But she ate to please the nurse who had managed to get the supper for her and then went quickly back to Gregory. If it should happen when she was away! It must not. She mustgo there to keep it from happening. Surely she could. Surely she could.
She did not sleep. The nurse watched on one side, she on the other, the nurse nodding a little and Freda shaking off the fearful drowsiness that came over her too. She did not want to sleep. She was afraid that if she slept, it might happen. It was like sentry duty. As long as she was awake such a thing would not happen. She did not name death in her thoughts. It was like invoking a presence. She understood trite phrases as she thought—the triteness of “he has left us,” “passed on,” “was called.” How those phrases irked her in the newspapers sometimes. But they were true. It was like that. She heard the soft rise and fall of the nurse’s breathing. She was asleep—no, not quite.
Now and then he moved a little. His troubled breathing seemed to sigh, slight, weary sighs. Freda bent close over him. Here we are, she thought, he and I and him within me. We must stay close, closer than death can come.
Three hours later, with the gray light coming so early into the room, the nurse, who had slept a little, roused herself, busy immediately with the routine of temperature taking, her cap a little askew, her face puffed with uncompleted sleep.
“Well, we got through that night all right,” she said cheerfully, softly. “And our patient looks better, Mrs. Macmillan. Look at him—doesn’t he?”
Freda looked shakily at him. It seemed almost true. He seemed to be sleeping almost naturally.
“Then you think he’s come through?” she ventured.
The nurse straightened her cap professionally.
“Well, I should say that bad turn he took last night would be the last. He’ll be coming along now. We’ll get some nourishment into him pretty soon. You go overto the hotel and get some sleep—no, lie down here on my cot. You look weak.”
And now it was a new atmosphere—an atmosphere of convalescence, of Gregory coming slowly back to life, visibly changing for the better, smiling, joking feebly, watching her wonderingly and devotedly, talking when he was allowed.
“It’s such a ridiculous way to begin housekeeping,” Freda would tease him, gently.
“It’s a maddening way and a marvelous way—to have all day to watch you and adore you and not to dare to pull you into my arms for fear a nurse will pop out on me.”
“You may be sure one would.”
“How long do I have to stay here?”
“A wheeled chair next week if you are good and don’t get excited.”
“A wheeled chair—when I want a highway with you beside me—”
“If you’re impatient—” she stopped to smile at him.
“Listen, Freda—we go straight off together, don’t we?”
“Off where?”
“Back home.”
“We should stop to see my father and my mother. Do you know, Gregory, I didn’t even tell any one where I was going. I just came. I suppose they’re all mystified and probably worried. Though I wrote them not to be.”
“Well, we’ll stop to tell your parents. And then off for Ireland.”
“Have we enough money?” asked Freda.
“Plenty. I have it somewhere. Let me see. It was a black bill case—maybe you could find it for me. Black bill case with an elastic band around it. There’s aboutfive hundred. They paid me in notes—(bills, you say)—at these last places and I meant to get post office orders. Much safer. Hunt it up, will you, darling? And you might be looking up passage.”
“Passage for weeks from now,” she said sternly. But she was as eager as he and they smiled at each other, doubled, trebled in happiness now that their storm had come and they had been able to weather it together.