“So you’ve been gambling again—you’ve
broken your promise to me,” she said reprovingly
to Sibley, but with that wonderful, wistful laughter
in her eyes.
Sibley looked at her in astonishment. “Who
told you?” he asked. It had only happened
the night before, and it didn’t seem possible
she could know.
He was quite right. It wasn’t possible
she could know, and she didn’t know. She
only divined.
“I knew when you made the promise you couldn’t
keep it; that’s why I forgive you now,”
she added. “Knowing what I did about you,
I oughtn’t to have let you make it.”
The Young Doctor saw in her words a meaning that John
Sibley could never have understood, for it was a part
of the story of Crozier’s life reproduced—and
with what a different ending!
“Male and female created
he them”
When Crozier stepped out of the bright sunlight into
the shady living-room of the Tynan home, his eyes
were clouded by the memory of his conference with
Studd Bradley and his financial associates, and by
the desolate feeling that the five years since he
had left England had brought him nothing—nothing
at all except a new manhood. But that he did
not count an asset, because he had not himself taken
account of this new capital. He had never been
an introspective man in the philosophic sense, and
he never had thought that he was of much account.
He had lived long on his luck, and nothing had come
of it—“nothing at all, at all,”
as he said to himself when he stepped inside the room
where, unknown to him, his wife awaited him.
So abstracted was he, so disturbed was his gaze (fixed
on the inner thing), that he did not see the figure
in blue and white over against the wall, her hand
on the big arm-chair once belonging to Tyndall Tynan,
and now used always by Shiel Crozier, “the white-haired
boy of the Tynan sanatorium,” as Jesse Bulrush
had called him.
There was a strange timidity, and a fear not so strange,
in Mona’s eyes as she saw her husband enter
with that quick step which she had so longingly remembered
after he had fled from her; but of which she had taken
less account when he was with her at Lammis long ago-When
Crozier of Lammis was with her long ago. How
tall and shapely he was! How large he loomed
with the light behind him! How shadowed his face
and how distant the look in his eyes.
Somehow the room seemed too small for him, and yet
he had lived in this very house for four years and
more; he had slept in the next room all that time;
had eaten at this table and sat in this very chair—Mrs.
Tynan had told her that—for this long time,
like the master of a household. With that far-away,
brooding look in his face, he seemed in one sense as
distant from her as when she was in London in those
dreary, desolate years with no knowledge of his whereabouts,
a widow in every sense save one; but in her acts—that
had to be said for her—a wife always and
not a widow. She had not turned elsewhere, though
there had been temptation enough to do so.
