Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/183



T was late at night when Storrow returned to his studio after a day of restless wandering about the city that seemed without vistas and vision. The dregs of his trivially momentous quarrel with Torrie still lay sour at the bottom of his heart. He unlocked his door, tired of body and listless in spirit. He was startled, on stepping into the studio, to find his reading lamp switched on. He was still further startled to find Torrie huddled up in his big arm-chair of faded green velour.

She did not look up as he stood before her, and for a moment, as he studied the relaxed figure and the droop- ing head with its tumbled hair, he thought that she had fallen asleep. Then he caught the sound of an unmis- takable small sob. It was a sound that bewildered him at the same time that it devastated him, for he had never learned to associate Torrie with tears. She had always seemed to him too vital and too strong-willed for any such surrender. And he waited, shocked into silence, wondering as to the cause of this relapse. The wait was a long one. But it was finally broken by Torrie herself.

" I've been an awful fool, Owen," she said quickly, without lifting her face. But the note of contrition in that acknowledgment was too much for him. Before it he felt his ice walls of injured pride melt away. She was holding out one hand to him, blindly, still without the courage, apparently, to face him, still with her head bent low over the faded green chair-arm. So he dropped on his knee beside her, catching the groping hand in his, with a sudden tightening of the throat and an equally prompt relaxation of the iron hoops about his heart. 173