The somewhat drawling tones of Miss Watkins' voice were not at all in keeping with the activity of her wide-awake blue eyes. A sense of this nurse's speculation as to her presence there flicked Desire with little whips of irritation. It is one thing to observe and quite another to render oneself observable. She felt the blood flow hotly to her cheek.

Why had she come? How could she have so far forgotten her natural reserve, her instinctive dislike of intrusion? Desire saw plainly that she had allowed a regrettable sentiment to trick her into a ridiculous situation. Satisfied curiosity is usually ashamed of itself.

And how absurd to have fancied for a moment that this blond prettiness could be Mary!

"I am afraid I cannot wait longer," she murmured with polite regret.

"If there is any message--"

"None, I think. Thank you so much."

With the departure of her caller, Miss Watkins' manner underwent a remarkable change. Professional coolness deserted her. She stamped her foot and, from the safe concealment of the window curtain, she watched Desire's unhurried progress down the street with eyes in which the blue grew clouded and opaque. They brightened again as she noticed Professor Spence pa.s.sing on the opposite side of the street, and became quite snappy with interest as she saw him pause as if to call to his wife, then, after a swift and hesitating glance at the door from which she had emerged, pa.s.s on without attracting her attention.

As a bit of pure pantomime, these expressions of feeling on Miss Watkins' part might be misleading with-out the added comment of a letter which she wrote that night.

"I'm going to cut it, Flossy old girl," wrote Miss Watkins. "If you know of anything near you that would suit me, pa.s.s it on. I think I'm about due to get out of here. You know why I've stayed so long. At first, I thought if we were together enough he might get to care.

People say I'm not bad for the eyes. And I don't use peroxide. Well, I've made myself useful--he'll miss me anyway!

"It's kind of hard to give up. But I don't believe it's a bit of use.

I've noticed a difference in him ever since he came back from that western trip. He doesn't seem to see me anymore. And there's something else, a look in his eyes and a line along his mouth that were never there before. I knew something had happened. And now I know what it was. Another girl, of course.

"And this girl is married!

"You might think this would make things hopeful for me. But it doesn't.

Doctor's just the kind that would go on loving her if she had a thousand husbands. So here's where I hook it. No use wasting myself, honey. Maybe I'll get over it. They say everyone does.

"Funny thing--she's just the kind I'd think he'd go dippy over, dark and still, with a lovely, wide mouth and skin like lilies. She is young, younger than I am. But, believe me, she isn't a kid. Those eyes of hers have seen things. They're the kind of eyes that I'd go wild over if I were a man. So I'm not blaming Doctor. He can't help it.

"She came into the office today, just like an ordinary patient. But I knew right off that she'd come for some-thing. Don't know yet what she came for. She doesn't give herself away, that one! Didn't seem to look around, didn't ask questions and only stayed a few minutes. Do you suppose she could have come to see me? Because, if she did--Well, that shows where her interest is.

"Another odd thing--as she went out, I saw her husband. (I'll tell you, in strict confidence, that her husband is Professor Spence. They are well known people here. He used to be a sort of recluse. A queer chap.

Deep as a judge.) Well, I saw him pa.s.s, on the opposite side of the road. He saw her and was just going to call, when it seemed to strike him where she had come from. I couldn't see very well across the road, but he looked as if someone had hit him. And he went on without saying a word. Now that looked queer to me.

"Don't write and say that I'm only guessing at things. I may be mistaken, of course, but I know I'm not. And I'm not a Pharisee (or whoever it was that threw stones). If she cares for Doctor, I suppose she can't help it. Some people think her husband handsome but I don't.

He's too thin and he has the oddest little smile. It slips out and slips in like a mouse. When Dr. John smiles, he smiles all over.

"Well, I'll wait a week or so to make sure. Although I'm sure now. If I ever see Doctor look at her, I'll know. You see, I know how he'd look if he looked that way. I've kept hoping--but I guess I'd better take my ticket, Yours,

"MARY."

This letter satisfactorily explains the loss, some weeks later, of Dr.

Rogers' capable nurse--a matter which he, himself, could never understand.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Desire was smiling as she left Dr. Rogers' office. It was a smile compounded of derision and relief--a shamefaced smile which admitted an opinion of herself very far from flattering.

So occupied was she with her mental reactions that she had no attention to spare for the opposite side of the street and therefore missed the slightly peculiar action of her husband-by-courtesy. Professor Spence, when he had first caught sight of his wife had automatically paused, as if to call or cross over. It had become their friendly habit to inform each other of their daily plans and a cheery "whither away?" had risen naturally to the professor's lips. It rose to them, but did not leave them, for, in the intervening instant, he had grasped the fact of Desire's smiling abstraction and had sought its explanation in the place from which she had come. Desire calling at old Bones' office at this hour of the morning? Before he had recovered from the surprise of it, she had pa.s.sed.

Time, which seems so mighty, is sometimes quite negligible. The most amazing mental illuminations may occupy only the fraction of a second.

A light flashes and is gone--but meanwhile one has seen.

The professor's pause was hardly noticeable. He walked on at once. But years could not have instructed him more thoroughly than that one second. He had received a revelation. Like all revelations, he received it in its entirety and realized it piecemeal. His thoughts stumbled over each other in confusion.... Desire at John's office at this unusual hour? ... Desire in her prettiest frock and smiling ...

smiling, and so lost in her own thoughts that she saw no one ...

Desire ... John? ... What the devil!

Spence had a finicky dislike of strong language. He thought it savored of weakness, yet he found himself swearing heartily as he hurried on--meaningless swears which by their very childishness brought him back to common sense. His step slowed, he forced himself to be reasonable. He took a brief against his own unwarranted disturbance of mind and reduced it to argument. There was nothing at all strange, he pointed out, in Desire having called at old Bones' office at this, or any other, time of day (but what under heaven did she do it for?). She might easily have forgotten to tell the doctor some-thing. (What in thunder would she have to tell him?) She might have dropped in, in pa.s.sing (at that hour of the morning?) merely to ask him over for some tennis (was the dashed telephone out of order?). Or she might have felt a trifle seedy (pshaw! her health was perfect--idiot!). Anyway she had a perfect right to see Dr. Rogers at any time and for any reason she might choose. (Yes, she had--that was the devil of it!)

At this point of his argument the professor was nearly-run down by a delivery boy on a bicycle and saved himself only by a sharp collision with a telegraph pole. This served to clear his brain somewhat. His confusion of thought dropped away. He began to look his revelation in the face--

"Desire--John?"

It was certainly possible! Why had he never seen it before? ... He had been warned. John himself had warned him--Old John who had been so palpably "hit" when he had first seen Desire at Friendly Bay. But he, Benis Spence, had laughed. Honestly laughed. No possibility of this possibility had troubled him. He simply had not seen it. And now--he saw. The thing italicised itself on his brain.

Granted that Desire might love, there was no reason on earth why she should not love John.

The conclusion seemed childishly simple and yet he had never seriously considered it. Why? Relentlessly he forced himself to answer why. It was because he had believed that when Desire woke to love, if she should so wake, she would wake to love for him! He tore this admission out of a shrinking heart and laughed at it. It was funny, quite funny in its ridiculous conceit.... But it hadn't been conceit, it had been a.s.surance. Impossible to account for, and absurd as it seemed now, it was some-thing higher than vanity which had hidden in his heart that happy sense of kinship with Desire which had made John's warning seem an emptiness of words.

It was gone now, that wonderful sense of "belonging," swept away in the swift rush of startled doubt. Searching as it might, his mind could not find anywhere the faintest foothold for a belief that Desire, free to choose, should turn to him and not to another.

"I had better go and sleep this off somewhere," murmured the professor with a wry smile. "Mustn't let it get ahead of me. Mustn't make any more mistakes. This needs thinking out--steady now!"

He tried to forget his own problem in thinking of hers. It couldn't be very pleasant for her--this. And yet she had been smiling as she came out of John's office. Perhaps she did not know yet? On second thoughts, he felt sure that she did not know. He recognized the essentials of Desire. She was loyalty itself. And had he not reason to know from his own present experience that the beginnings of love can be very blind.

John, too--but with John it was different. John had given his warning.

If the warning were to be justified he could not blame John. He could not blame anyone save his own too confident self. Why, oh why, had he been so sure? Had he not known that love is the most unaccountable of all the pa.s.sions? How had he dared to build security on that subtle thing within himself which, without cause or reason, had claimed as his the unstirred heart of the girl he had married.

Spence returned home with lagging step. The old distaste for familiar things, which he thought had gone with the coming of Desire, was heavy upon him. The gate of his pleasant home shut behind him like a prison gate. In short, Benis Spence paid for a moment's enlightenment with a bad day and a night that was no better.

By the morning he had won through. One must carry on. And the advantage of a quiet manner is that no one notices when it grows more quiet.

Desire was already in the library when he entered it. She looked very crisp and cool. It struck Spence for the first time that she was dressing her part--the neat, dark skirt and laundered blouse, blackbowed at the neck in a perfect orgy of simplicity, were eminently secretarial. How beautifully young she was!

Desire looked up from her note-book with business-like prompt.i.tude.

"I think," she said, "that we are quite ready to go on with the thirteenth chapter."

"But I think," said Benis, "that it would be much nicer to go fishing."

"Why?"

"Well, it's Friday, for one thing. Do you really think it safe to begin the thirteenth chapter on a Friday?"

His secretary's smile was dutiful, but her lips were firm. "We didn't do a thing-yesterday," she reminded him. "I couldn't find you anywhere and no one knew where you were."