Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/121



ORE than three weeks had passed, and Kay had had no letter from Tom. Twice a day she waited for the mail bag to be brought up from the village, twice a day she ran through its contents feverishly, and twice a day, fairly shaken with disappointment, she began again her tense watching of the clock until the next mail was due to arrive.

The strain began to tell on her.

She wakened one morning to see from her balcony the dahlia heads in the fall garden drooping on their stems, and the ground frozen hard. An icy wind from the Northwest was blowing before it leaves that sailed like birds and then settled to the ground. It seemed to her that a cold hand had come out of the West and caught her heart.

"Good gracious, Miss Kay, do come in! You'll catch your death of cold."

"I'm all right, Nora."

But she was not all right. The girls and men she knew were noticing it.

"What's the matter with Kay, anyhow? She has positively no pep any more."

"Maybe Herbert's been naughty!"

"Herbert's idea of being naughty is to forget to go to Sunday school. Try again."

She tried arguing with herself. It was not over, this affair of Tom's and hers. Things did not end like that. Two people who loved each other did not simply separate, without a word, without a farewell. Life might separate them, but not their own voluntary act.

In an increasing agony of mind she reviewed their last meeting, trying to find in it some explanation of his silence. She discarded all her old standards, the ones she would have used in judging Herbert, for instance, and tried to see the affair from Tom's viewpoint. Had he, thinking things