Page:Jalna.pdf/332

 "Don't cry, youngster. I'll take care of you. Glad to have you back. Damned lonely."

She caught his hand and pressed a dozen wild kisses on it.

"Oh, Maurice, how good you are! How good to me! And how good Piers was to me—and I didn't deserve it. Hanging is too good for me!" And she added, melodramatically: Twere better I had never been born!"

She rose then and wiped her eyes. She was a pitiful little figure. Her clothes were torn from running distractedly through a blackberry plantation. Her hands and even her pale face were bleeding from scratches. She had lost a shoe, and the stockinged foot was wet with mud.

"Yes, 'twere," he repeated, agreeably.

With a certain pathetic dignity, she turned toward the door.

"Will it be all the same to you, Maurice, if I go to my room?"

"Same to me—wherever you go—absolutely."

How different this hall, she thought, as she dragged herself up the bare stairs, from the luxurious hall at Jalna, with its thickly carpeted stairs, its dark red rugs, its stained-glass window. The great moose head which had been her especial terror in childhood now glared down its long hard nose at her, with nostrils distended, as though it longed to toss her on its cruel horns.

She felt dazed. She scarcely suffered, except for the aching in her legs, as she threw herself across her old bed. With half-shut eyes she lay staring at the two pictures on the wall opposite, "Wide Awake" and "Fast Asleep," which had once hung in Maurice's nursery. Darling little baby pictures; how she had always loved them— She wished she had the strength of mind to kill