“What made her go home?”
“I don’t know, Jim.”
“She didn’t say?”
“Don’t hold me like that. No.”
She tried to free her arm, but he held her, his face
angry and suspicious.
“You are lying to me,” he snarled.
“She gave you a reason. What was it?”
Elinor was frightened, but she had not lost her head.
She was thinking rapidly.
“She had a visitor this afternoon, a young man.
He must have told her something about last night.
She came up and told me she was going.”
“You know he told her something, don’t
you?”
“Yes.” Elinor had cowered against
the wall. “Jim, don’t look like
that. You frighten me. I couldn’t
keep her here. I—”
“What did he tell her?”
“He accused you.”
He was eyeing her coldly, calculatingly. All
his suspicions of the past weeks suddenly crystallized.
“And you let her go, after that,” he
said slowly. “You were glad to have her
go. You didn’t deny what she said.
You let her run back home, with what she had guessed
and what you told her to-day. You—”
He struck her then. The blow was as remorseless
as his voice, as deliberate. She fell down the
staircase headlong, and lay there, not moving.
The elderly maid came running from the kitchen, and
found him half-way down the stairs, his eyes still
calculating, but his body shaking.
“She fell,” he said, still staring down.
But the servant faced him, her eyes full of hate.
“You devil!” she said. “If
she’s dead, I’ll see you hang for it.”
But Elinor was not dead. Doctor Smalley, making
rounds in a nearby hospital and answering the emergency
call, found her lying on her bed, fully conscious
and in great pain, while her husband bent over her
in seeming agony of mind. She had broken her
leg. He sent Doyle out during the setting.
It was a principle of his to keep agonized husbands
out of the room.
Life had beaten Lily Cardew. She went about
the house, pathetically reminiscent of Elinor Doyle
in those days when she had sought sanctuary there;
but where Elinor had seen those days only as interludes
in her stormy life, Lily was finding a strange new
peace. She was very tender, very thoughtful,
insistently cheerful, as though determined that her
own ill-fortune should not affect the rest of the
household.
But to Lily this peace was not an interlude, but an
end. Life for her was over. Her bright
dreams were gone, her future settled. Without
so putting it, even to herself, she dedicated herself
to service, to small kindnesses, and little thoughtful
acts. She was, daily and hourly, making reparation
to them all for what she had cost them, in hope.
