Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/252

 'Why, she's gone out already, m'lady—they'd never miss the morning tide for a big thing like her. The Captain left by daybreak—seems like you must have heard him.'

Then she felt that she had always known she would not see Anthony again. She murmured incoherently about the Pontif ex family—but felt she deceived this servant no more than she had deceived Clapyard's little cousin—there seemed to be a strange freemasonry between the lovers of Anthony Jones the world over, and they were unable to keep from giving each other the secret sign. She added slowly and with dawning wonder in her voice:

'But I did hear him.' The slam of a door, the clump, clump of boots—these things had come to her in a dream, only realized, never heard. That was why she had dreamed of the bronze boxer Mamma had sent her for the stereoscope, and thought that he was trying to get in the window—clump, clump, clump—his massive metal feet...

'M'lady, you have had no tea yet. I'll fetch you some and thin bread-and-butter.'

Lanice thanked the girl and listlessly sat upon the edge of the bed and stared at the round dent in the pillow his head had made.

To her feverish hands it seemed that some of his bodily warmth still lingered in the tumbled linen of his bed. She shut her eyes and rocked her narrow body, opened them and looked again upon the pillow marked by the shape of his head. She stared, striving vainly to conjure up the true and living memory of