第125章

"Lorna, my God!" He caught hold of her and strained her to his breast."You are lovely and sweet! It's frightful--you in this life."Her expression made the sobs choke up into his throat.She said quietly: "Not worse than dirt and vermin and freezing cold and long, long, dull--oh, _so_ dull hours of working among human beings that don't ever wash--because they can't." She pushed him gently away."You don't understand.You haven't been through it.

Comfortable people talk like fools about those things....Do you remember my hands that first evening?"He reddened and his eyes shifted."I'm absurdly sensitive about a woman's hands," he muttered.

She laughed at him."Oh, I saw--how you couldn't bear to look at them--how they made you shiver.Well, the hands were nothing--_nothing_!--beside what you didn't see.""Lorna, do you love someone else?"

His eyes demanded an honest answer, and it seemed to her his feeling for her deserved it.But she could not put the answer into words.She lowered her gaze.

"Then why----" he began impetuously.But there he halted, for he knew she would not lift the veil over herself, over her past.

"I'm very, very fond of you," she said with depressing friendliness.Then with a sweet laugh, "You ought to be glad I'm not able to take you at your word.And you will be glad soon."She sighed."What a good time we've had!"

"If I only had a decent allowance, like Fatty!" he groaned.

"No use talking about that.It's best for us to separate best for us both.You've been good to me--you'll never know how good.

And I can't play you a mean trick.I wish I could be selfish enough to do it, but I can't.""You don't love me.That's the reason."

"Maybe it is.Yes, I guess that's why I've got the courage to be square with you.Anyhow, John, you can't afford to care for me.

And if I cared for you, and put off the parting--why it'd only put off what I've got to go through with before----" She did not finish; her eyes became dreamy.

"Before what?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, returning with a sigh."Something Isee--yet don't see in the darkness, ahead of me.""I can't make you out," cried he.Her expression moved him to the same awe she inspired in Etta--a feeling that gave both of them the sense of having known her better, of having been more intimate with her when they first met her than they ever had been since or ever would be again.

When Redmond embraced and kissed her for the last time, he was in another and less sympathetic mood, was busy with his own wounds to vanity and perhaps to heart.He thought her heartless--good and sweet and friendly, but without sentiment.

She refused to help him make a scene; she refused to say she would write to him, and asked him not to write to her."You know we'll probably see each other soon.""Not till the long vacation--not till nearly July.""Only three months."

"Oh, if you look at it that way!" said he, piqued and sullen.

Girls had always been more than kind, more than eager, when he had shown interest.

Etta, leaving on a later train, was even more depressed about Susan's heart.She wept hysterically, wished Susan to do the same; but Susan stood out firmly against a scene, and would not have it that Etta was shamefully deserting her, as Etta tearfully accused herself."You're going to be happy," she said."And I'm not so selfish as to be wretched about it.And don't you worry a minute on my account.I'm better off in every way than I've ever been.I'll get on all right.""I know you gave up John to help me with August.I know you mean to break off everything.Oh, Lorna, you mustn't--you mustn't.""Don't talk nonsense," was Susan's unsatisfactory reply.

When it came down to the last embrace and the last kiss, Etta did feel through Susan's lips and close encircling arms a something that dried up her hysterical tears and filled her heart with an awful aching.It did not last long.No matter how wildly shallow waters are stirred, they soon calm and murmur placidly on again.The three who had left her would have been amazed could they have seen her a few minutes after Etta's train rolled out of the Union Station.The difference between strong natures and weak is not that the strong are free from cowardice and faint-heartedness, from doubt and foreboding, from love and affection, but that they do not stay down when they are crushed down, stagger up and on.

Susan hurried to the room they had helped her find the day before--a room in a house where no questions were asked or answered.She locked herself in and gave way to the agonies of her loneliness.And when her grief had exhausted her, she lay upon the bed staring at the wall with eyes that looked as though her soul had emptied itself through them of all that makes life endurable, even of hope.For the first time in her life she thought of suicide--not suicide the vague possibility, not suicide the remote way of escape, but suicide the close and intimate friend, the healer of all woes, the solace of all griefs--suicide, the speedy, accurate solver of the worst problem destiny can put to man.

She saw her pocketbook on the floor where she had dropped it.