“So, though it was wrong—wicked—in
one way, I read the letter, to do some good by it,
if it could be done. If I hadn’t read it
you wouldn’t be here. Was it worth while?”
At that moment there was a knock at the outer door
of the other room, or, rather, on the lintel of it.
Mona started. Suppose it was her husband —that
was her thought.
Kitty read the look. “No, it isn’t
Mr. Crozier. It’s the Young Doctor.
I know his knock. Will you come and see him?”
The wife was trembling, she was very pale, her eyes
were rather staring, but she fought to control herself.
It was evident that Kitty expected her to do so.
It was also quite certain that Kitty meant to settle
things now, in so far as it could be done.
“He knows as much as you do?” asked Mrs.
Crozier.
“No, the Young Doctor hasn’t read the
letter and I haven’t told him what’s in
it; but he knows that I read it, and what he doesn’t
know he guesses. He is Mr. Crozier’s honest,
clever friend. I’ve got an idea—
an invention to put this thing right. It’s
a good one. You’ll see. But I want
the Young Doctor to know about it. He never has
to think twice. He knows what to do the very
first time.”
A moment later they were in the other room, with the
Young Doctor smiling down at “the little spot
of a woman,” as he called Crozier’s wife.
AWAITING THE VERDICT
“You look quite settled and at home,”
the Young Doctor remarked, as he offered Mrs. Crozier
a chair. She took it, for never in her life had
she felt so small physically since coming to the great,
new land. The islands where she was born were
in themselves so miniature that the minds of their
people, however small, were not made to feel insignificant.
But her mind, which was, after all, vastly larger
in proportion than the body enshrining it, felt suddenly
that both were lost in a universe. Her impulse
was to let go and sink into the helplessness of tears,
to be overwhelmed by an unconquerable loneliness;
but the Celtic courage in her, added to that ancient
native pride which prevents one woman from giving
way before another woman towards whom she bears jealousy,
prevented her from showing the weakness she felt.
Instead, it roused her vanity and made her choose
to sit down, so disguising perceptibly the disparity
of height which gave Kitty an advantage over her and
made the Young Doctor like some menacing Polynesian
god.
Both these people had an influence and authority in
Mona Crozier’s life which now outweighed the
advantage wealth gave her. Her wealth had not
kept her husband beside her when delicate and perfumed
tyranny began to flutter its banners of control over
him. Her fortune had driven him forth when her
beauty and her love ought to have kept him close to
her, whatever fate might bring to their door, or whatever
his misfortune or the catastrophe falling on him.
It was all deeply humiliating, and the inward dejection
made her now feel that her body was the last effort
of a failing creative power. So she sat down
instead of standing up in a vain effort at retrieval.
