"She hadn't the reason you're thinking of. I feel very sure of that.

I've asked her mother--and she says she knows it."

Mrs. Masterman was uttering some expression of relief, but Lois could listen to no more. In her heart there was room for only one consideration. "Money! Money!" she was saying to herself as she went down the avenue beneath the leafing elms. "He was going to give her--that."

But Ena returned to the threshold of the library, where her husband, standing with his back to the empty fireplace, was meditating moodily.

"Archie," she faltered, "you do think that girl was only seeking notoriety, don't you?"

He raised his head, which had been hanging pensively. "Certainly. Don't you?"

She tried to speak with conviction. "Oh yes; of--of course."

"That is," Archie a.n.a.lyzed, "she was going in for cheap tragedy in the hope that the sensation would reach Claude. That was her game--quite evidently. Dare say it was a put-up job between her and those two young men. Took very good care, at any rate, to have 'em 'longside."

"But if Claude should hear of it--"

"Must see that he doesn't. Wiring him to-night to go on to j.a.pan, after he's seen California. Let him go to India, if he likes--round the world.

Anything to keep him away--and you and I," he added, "had better hook it till the whole thing blows over."

She looked distressed. "Hook it, Archie?"

"Close the house up and go abroad. Haven't been abroad for three years now. Little motor trip through England--and back toward the end of the summer. Fortunately I've sold that confounded property. Good price, too.

Hobson, of Hobson & Davies. Going to build for residence. Takes it from the expiration of the lease, which is up in July. He'll clear out the whole gang then, so that by the time we come back they'll be gone. What do you think? Might do Devonshire and Cornwall--always wanted to take that trip--with a few weeks in Paris before we come home."

The suggestion of going abroad came as such a pleasing surprise that Mrs. Masterman slipped into a chair to turn it over in her mind. "Then Claude _couldn't_ come back, could he?" expressed the first of the advantages she foresaw. "He'd have nowhere to go."

"Oh, he'll not be in a hurry to do that," Archie said, confidently.

"And I do want some things," she mused further. "I had nothing to wear for the Darlings' ball--nothing--and you know how long I've worn the dinner-dresses I have. I really couldn't put on the green again." She was silent for some minutes, when another of those queer little cries escaped her such as had broken from her lips when she stood at the door with Lois: "But, oh, Archie, I want to do what's right!--what's right, Archie!"

He looked at her from under his brows as his head again drooped moodily.

"What's--_what_?"

"What's right, Archie. Latterly--Oh, I don't know!--but latterly--" She pa.s.sed her hand across her brow.... "Sometimes I feel--I get to be afraid, Archie--as if we weren't--as if we hadn't--as if something were going to happen--to overtake us--"

Crossing the room, he bent back her pretty head and kissed her.

"Nonsense," he smiled, unsteadily. "Nerves, dear. Don't wonder at it--with all we've been through--one way and another. But that's what we'll do. Close the house up and go abroad for three months.

Inconvenient just now with the upset in the business--but we'll do it.

Get out of the way. See something new. There, now, old girl," he coaxed, patting her on the shoulder, "brace up and shake it off. Nothing but nerves." He added, as he moved back toward his stand by the fireplace, "Get 'em myself."

"Do you, Archie? Like that? Like--like what I said?"

He had resumed his former att.i.tude, his feet wide apart, his hands behind his back, his head hanging, when he muttered, "Like the devil."

She was not sure how much mental discomfort was indicated by the phrase, so she sat looking at him distressfully. Being unused to grappling with grave questions of right and wrong, she found the process difficult. It was like wandering through mora.s.ses in which she could neither sink nor swim, till she found herself emerging on solid, familiar ground again with the reconciling observation, "Well, I do need a few things."

CHAPTER XXVII

It was not till Rosie was well enough to go listlessly back to work, and the Mastermans had sailed, that Lois found her own emotions ripe for speech. During the intervening fortnight she and Thor had lived their ordinary life together, but on a basis which each knew to be temporary.

While he kept his office hours in the mornings and visited his patients in the afternoons, and she busied herself with household tasks or superintended the gardener in replanting the faded tulip-beds with phlox and sweet-peas and dahlias; while she sewed or did embroidery in the evenings and listened to him reading aloud, or--since the nights were growing warm--they sat silent on an upper balcony, or talked about the stars, each knew that the inner tension would never be relaxed till it was broken.

If there was any doubt of that it was on Thor's side. Because she said nothing, there were minutes when he hoped she had nothing to say.

Unaware of a woman's capacity for keeping the surface unruffled while storm may be raging beneath, he beguiled himself at times into thinking that his fears of her acuteness had been false alarms. If so, he could only be thankful. He wanted to forget. If he had had a prayer to put up on the subject, it would have been that she would allow him to forget.

So, as day followed day, regularly, peacefully, with an abstention on her part from comment that could give him pain, he began to indulge the hope--a hope which he knew in his heart to be baseless--that she had nothing to remember.

When he was called on at last to face the realities of the case the moment was as unexpected to him as it was to her. She had not meant to bring the subject up on that particular evening. She had made no program--not because she was uncertain as to what she ought to say, but because the impulse to say it lagged. In the end it came to her without warning, surprising herself no less than him.

"Thor, were you going to give money to Rosie Fay?"

The croaking of frogs seemed part of the silence in which she waited for his answer. The warm air was heavy with the scents of lilac, honeysuckle, and syringa. As they stood by the railing of the balcony that connected the exterior of their two rooms, she erect, he leaning outward with an arm stretched toward the sky, a great white lilac, whose roots were in the early days of the Willoughby farm, threw up its tribute of blossom almost to their feet. The lights of the village being banked under verdure, the eye sought the stars.

Thor loved the stars. On moonless nights he spent hours in contemplation of their beckoning mystery. From Auriga and Taurus in January, he followed them round to Aries and Perseus in December, getting a beam on his inward way. Just now, with the aid of a pencil, he was tracing for his wife's benefit the lines of the rising Virgin. Lois could almost discern the graceful, rec.u.mbent figure, winged, n.o.ble, lying on the eastern horizon, Spica's sweet, silvery light a-tremble in her hand. She was actually thinking how white for a star was Spica's radiance, when the words slipped out: "Thor, were you going to give money to Rosie Fay?"

He suppressed the natural question concerning her sources of information in order to say, as quietly as he could, "If--if Claude had married her I was going to--to help them out."

She resented what she considered his evasiveness. "That isn't just what I asked."

"Even so, it tells you what you want to know. Doesn't it?"

"Not everything I want to know."

"Why should you want to know--everything?"

"Because--" It struck her that her reason could be best expressed by shifting her ground. "Thor dear, exactly why did you want to marry me?"

The change in tactics troubled him. "I think I told you that at the time."

"You told me you came to me as to a--to a shelter."

"And as to a home. I said that, too, Lois."

"Yes," she agreed, slowly, "you said that, too." A brief interval gave emphasis to the succeeding words: "But did you think it was enough?"

"I couldn't judge of that. I could only say--what I had to say--truthfully."

"Oh, I know it was--truthfully. It's--it's just the trouble. You see, Thor," she went on, unsteadily, "I thought you were telling me only some of what was in your heart--and it was all."

"I'm not certain that I know what you mean by all. What I felt was--so much." He added, reproachfully, "It's surely a great deal when a man finds a woman his refuge from trouble."

"That's perfectly true, Thor; and there's no one in the world who wouldn't be touched by it. But in the case of a wife, she can hardly help thinking of the kind of trouble he's escaping from."

"But so long as he escapes from it--"

She interrupted quickly: "Yes; so long as he does. But when he doesn't?

When, instead of leaving his trouble outside the refuge, he brings it in?"