Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/328



T was a week later that Torrie, after one of her solitary walks, returned home later than usual. Her air of suppressed excitement alternating with periods of abstraction did not escape the watchful-eyed Storrow. He was disturbed, subliminally, as creatures of the wild are disturbed by vague scents of an unseen enemy wafted up-wind. He watched her that day, and on the days that followed, with guarded and jealous eyes. But he said nothing and did nothing, for the simple reason that instinct told him there was nothing to say or do.

He had been prompted, at first, to follow Torrie. But that was an impulse which he dismissed, glad as he would have been of the chance to bring things to a head. He hated the thought of dodging and skulking after her. And she could not be watched forever, no matter how he stooped to the tricks and degradations of espionage. The situation, he came to feel, was something which now lay in the lap of the gods.

Torrie, in the meantime, had twice secretly met Donnie Eastman, and had twice returned home from those meet- ings with a strangely contradictory feeling of power mingled with frustration. Keen as was her woman's joy born of the knowledge that she could control a fellow- being, and a fellow-being who had drunk deep of life, by her smile or frown, she was intimidated by the dis- covery that the reckless-eyed Donnie had come to her to demand the impossible. And while nothing, as yet, had come of either those meetings or those demands, Torrie also carried the disquieting conviction that her destiny 318