The woman laughed merrily. She felt that she
was getting with the shop a flavour of romance and
adventure very attractive to her. Then she walked
to the door and smiled through the screen. “She
has only just left,” she said. “She
went to the Burlington station. I think she has
gone West. I heard her tell the man about her
trunk. She has been around here for two days
since I bought the shop. I think she has been
waiting for you to come. You did not come and
now she has gone and perhaps you won’t find
her. She did not look like one who would quarrel
with a lover.”
The woman in the shop laughed softly as McGregor hurried
away. “Now who would think that quiet little
woman would have such a lover?” she asked herself.
Down the street ran McGregor and raising his hand
stopped a passing automobile. The woman saw him
seated in the automobile talking to a grey-haired
man at the wheel and then the machine turned and disappeared
up the street at a law-breaking pace.
McGregor had again a new light on the character of
Edith Carson. “I can see her doing it,”
he told himself—“cheerfully telling
Margaret that it didn’t matter and all the time
planning this in the back of her head. Here all
of these years she has been leading a life of her
own. The secret longings, the desires and the
old human hunger for love and happiness and expression
have been going on under her placid exterior as they
have under my own.”
McGregor thought of the busy days behind him and realised
with shame how little Edith had seen of him.
It was in the days when his big movement of The Marching
Men was just coming into the light and on the night
before he had been in a conference of labour men who
had wanted him to make a public demonstration of the
power he had secretly been building up. Every
day his office was filled with newspaper men who asked
questions and demanded explanations. And in the
meantime Edith had been selling her shop to that woman
and getting ready to disappear.
In the railroad station McGregor found Edith sitting
in a corner with her face buried in the crook of her
arm. Gone was the placid exterior. Her shoulders
seemed narrower. Her hand, hanging over the back
of the seat in front of her, was white and lifeless.
McGregor said nothing but snatched up the brown leather
bag that sat beside her on the floor and taking her
by the arm led her up a flight of stone steps to the
street.
In the Ormsby household father and daughter sat in
the darkness on the veranda. After Laura Ormsby’s
encounter with McGregor there had been another talk
between her and David. Now she had gone on a visit
to her home-town in Wisconsin and father and daughter
sat together.
To his wife David had talked pointedly of Margaret’s
affair. “It is not a matter of good sense,”
he had said; “one can not pretend there is a
prospect of happiness in such an affair. The man
is no fool and may some day be a big man but it will
not be the kind of bigness that will bring either
happiness or contentment to a woman like Margaret.
He may end his life in jail.”
