Page:Middle Aged Love Stories (IA middleagedlove00bacorich).djvu/177

 shook her. It seemed to her that he must hear the beating of her heart, that every long, hard breath would surely startle him. So helpless, so poor, so horribly, hopelessly sad! She had read of terrible homesickness—the Swiss for his Alps, the peasant for his farm; they seemed romantic, elemental, vague. But this little Frenchman, this dapper chatterer of the light-heartedest language in all the world, did he harbor this tragedy? For to her tender, unworn heart the tragedy was remorselessly clear. This bent figure in its faded dressing-gown; this face almost strange to her in its worn, gray anguish; these nerveless, half-open hands—she read them all too well.

"Oh, no, he mustn't, he mustn't!" she whispered, and grasped the banisters, and tried to turn away her eyes: for his own filled slowly before her.

She got up the stairs, her fingers in her ears, stumbling over the long wrapper, seeming to herself to wake the house