第7章

He took advantage of this odd but opportune melting.He placed his arm around her shoulders.She tried to escape it, but with a coy, shy movement, half hysterical, half girlish, unlike her usual stony, moral precision."Yes, Joan," he repeated, laughingly, "but whose fault is it? Not HIS, remember! And I firmly believe he thinks you can do him good.""But he has never seen me," she continued, with a nervous little laugh, "and probably considers me some old Gorgon--like--like--Sister Jemima Skerret."

Blandford smiled with the complacency of far-reaching masculine intuition.Ah! that shrewd fellow, Demorest, was right.Joan, dear Joan, was only a woman after all.

"Then he'll be the more agreeably astonished," he returned, gayly, "and I think YOU will, too, Joan.For Dick isn't a bad-looking fellow; most women like him.It's true," he continued, much amused at the novelty of the perfectly natural toss and grimace with which Mrs.Blandford received this statement.

"I think he's been pointed out to me somewhere," she said, thoughtfully; "he's a tall, dark, dissipated-looking man.""Nothing of the kind," laughed her husband."He's middle-sized and as blond as your cousin Joe, only he's got a long yellow moustache, and has a quick, abrupt way of talking.He isn't at all fancy-looking; you'd take him for an energetic business man or a doctor, if you didn't know him.So you see, Joan, this correct little wife of mine has been a little, just a little, prejudiced."He drew her again gently backwards and nearer his seat, but she caught his wrists in her slim hands, and rising from the chair at the same moment, dexterously slipped from his embrace with her back towards him."I do not know why I should be unprejudiced by anything you've told me," she said, sharply closing the book of sermons, and, with her back still to her husband, reinstating it formally in its place on the cabinet."It's probably one of his many scandalous pursuits of defenceless and believing women, and he, no doubt, goes off to Boston, laughing at you for thinking him in earnest; and as ready to tell his story to anybody else and boast of his double deceit." Her voice had a touch of human asperity in it now, which he had never before noticed, but recognizing, as he thought, the human cause, it was far from exciting his displeasure.

"Wrong again, Joan; he's waiting here at the Independence House for me to see him to-morrow," he returned, cheerfully."And I believe him so much in earnest that I would be ready to swear that not another person will ever know the story but you and I and he.No, it is a real thing with him; he's dead in love, and it's your duty as a Christian to help him."There was a moment of silence.Mrs.Blandford remained by the cabinet, methodically arranging some small articles displaced by the return of the book."Well," she said, suddenly, "you don't tell me what mother had to say.Of course, as you came home earlier than you expected, you had time to stop THERE--only four doors from this house.""Well, no, Joan," replied Blandford, in awkward discomfiture."You see I met Dick first, and then--then I hurried here to you--and--and--I clean forgot it.I'm very sorry," he added, dejectedly.

"And I more deeply so," she returned, with her previous bloodless moral precision, "for she probably knows by this time, Edward, why you have omitted your usual Sabbath visit, and with WHOM you were.""But I can pull on my boots again and run in there for a moment,"he suggested, dubiously, "if you think it necessary.It won't take me a moment.""No," she said, positively; "it is so late now that your visit would only show it to be a second thought.I will go myself--it will be a call for us both.""But shall I go with you to the door? It is dark and sleeting,"suggested Blandford, eagerly.

"No," she replied, peremptorily."Stay where you are, and when Ezekiel and Bridget come in send them to bed, for I have made everything fast in the kitchen.Don't wait up for me."She left the room, and in a few moments returned, wrapped from head to foot in an enormous plaid shawl.A white woollen scarf thrown over her bare brown head, and twice rolled around her neck, almost concealed her face from view.When she had parted from her husband, and reached the darkened hall below, she drew from beneath the folds of her shawl a thick blue veil, with which she completely enveloped her features.As she opened the front door and peered out into the night, her own husband would have scarcely recognized her.

With her head lowered against the keen wind she walked rapidly down the street and stopped for an instant at the door of the fourth house.Glancing quickly back at the house she had left and then at the closed windows of the one she had halted before, she gathered her skirts with one hand and sped away from both, never stopping until she reached the door of the Independence Hotel.