Kathleen covered the transmitter with her hand. "She wants me to go and sit with Mr. Romayne while she drives you to the station. Icannot, I cannot do that. Where is Mother? Oh, Mother, I cannot go to Mrs. Waring-Gaunt's. I really cannot.""What nonsense, Kathleen!" cried Nora impatiently. "Why can't you go, pray? Let me speak to her." She took the receiver from her sister's hand. "Yes, Mrs. Waring-Gaunt, it is Nora.--I beg your pardon?--Oh, yes, certainly, one of us will be glad to go.--No, no, certainly not. I would not have Mr. Waring-Gaunt leave his work for the world.--I know, I know, awfully slow for him. We had not heard of the change. It is too bad.--Yes, surely one of us will be glad to come. We will fix it up some way. Good-bye."Nora hung up the receiver and turned fiercely upon her sister.
"Now, what nonsense is this," she said, "and she being so nice about the car, and that poor man suffering there, and we never even heard that he was worse? He was doing so splendidly, getting about all right. Blood-poisoning is so awful. Why, you remember the Mills boy? He almost lost his arm.""Oh, my dear Nora," said her mother. "There is no need of imagining such terrible things, but I am glad Dr. Brown is to be here. It is quite providential. I am sure he will put poor Mr. Romayne right. Kathleen, dear," continued the mother, turning to her elder daughter, "I think it would be very nice if you would run over to-morrow while Mrs. Waring-Gaunt drives to the station. I am sure it is very kind of her.""I know it is, Mother dear," said Kathleen. "But don't you think you would be so much better?""Oh, rubbish!" cried Nora. "If it were not Jane that is coming, Iwould go myself; I would only be too glad to go. He is perfectly splendid, so patient, and so jolly too, and Kathleen, you ought to go.""Nora, dear, we won't discuss it," said the mother in the tone that the family knew meant the end of all conversation. Kathleen hurried away from them and took refuge in her own room. Then shutting the door, she began pacing the floor, fighting once more the battle which during that last ten days she had often fought with herself and of which she was thoroughly weary. "Oh," she groaned, wringing her hands, "I cannot do it. I cannot look at him." She thought of that calm, impassive face which for the past three months this English gentleman had carried in all of his intercourse with her, and over against that reserve of his she contrasted her own passionate abandonment of herself in that dreadful moment of self-revelation. The contrast caused her to writhe in an agony of self-loathing. She knew little of men, but instinctively she felt that in his sight she had cheapened herself and never could she bear to look at him again. She tried to recall those glances of his and those broken, passionate words uttered during the moments of his physical suffering that seemed to mean something more than friendliness. Against these, however, was the constantly recurring picture of a calm cold face and of intercourse marked with cool indifference. "Oh, he cannot love me," she cried to herself. "I am sure he does not love me, and I just threw myself at him." In her march up and down the room she paused before her mirror and looked at the face that stared so wildly back at her. Her eyes rested on the red line of her mouth. "Oh," she groaned, rubbing vigorously those full red lips. "I just kissed him." She paused in the rubbing operation, gazed abstractedly into the glass; a tender glow drove the glare from her eyes, a delicious softness as from some inner well overflowed her countenance, the red blood surged up into her white face; she fled from her accusing mirror, buried her burning face in the pillow in an exultation of rapture. She dared not put into words the thoughts that rioted in her heart. "But I loved it, I loved it; I am glad I did." Lying there, she strove to recall in shameless abandon the sensation of those ecstatic moments, whispering in passionate self-defiance, "Idon't care what he thinks. I don't care if I was horrid. I am NOTsorry. Besides, he looked so dreadful." But she was too honest not to acknowledge to herself that not for pity's sake but for love's she had kissed him, and without even his invitation. Then once again she recalled the look in his eyes of surprise in the moment of his returning consciousness, and the little smile that played around his lips. Again wave upon wave of sickening self-loathing flooded from her soul every memory of the bliss of that supreme moment. Even now she could feel the bite of the cold, half humorous scorn in the eyes that had opened upon her as she withdrew her lips from his. On the back of this came another memory, sharp and stabbing, that this man was ill, perhaps terribly ill. "We are a little anxious about him," his sister had said, and she had mentioned the word "blood-poisoning." Of the full meaning of that dread word Kathleen had little knowledge, but it held for her a horror of something unspeakably dangerous. He had been restless, sleepless, suffering for the last two days and two nights. That very night and that very hour he was perhaps tossing in fever. An uncontrollable longing came over her to go to him. Perhaps she might give him a few hours' rest, might indeed help to give him the turn to health again. After all, what mattered her feelings. What difference if he should despise her, provided she brought him help in an hour of crisis. Physically weary with the long struggle through which she had been passing during the last ten days, sick at heart, and torn with anxiety for the man she loved, she threw herself upon her bed and abandoned herself to a storm of tears.
