Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/167

. "It will all come out all right. I'll think of something. Your mother—see the way she came around about the letter. She didn't forbid you to let me call—or anything. Look! Here are some people coming. Don't let them see you"

She put up her parasol and screened her face from the passers-by. He went the rest of the way in a miserable silence, she holding the parasol down against him too. When he left her at the gate, he pleaded: "I'll know to-morrow. I'll meet you—there. Don't"

She cut him short with a blind gesture of dismissal. She could not tell him that she had been crying with anger and self-pity because of the insolence of the Kimballs, and with disappointment because he had not thought of any way to defend her from them. She went indoors without a backward glance at him.

He began an interminable walk that led him in circles of thought, around and around, to no plan, to no conclusion, to no hope. She was going to leave him, for three years at least. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could say, to prevent it. She was going to leave him. And would she be waiting for him on the other side of that desert of separation? He was tormented by the fear that she might not. She was going to leave him. And suddenly he felt desperate, in revolt against the fate that was persecuting him, ready to do anything that would break this tyranny of circumstances and set him free to model his life to his desire.

He did not return to the boarding-house for supper, and when he did return he found Conroy and his friend