Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/348



TORROW, when he returned to New York two months later, went back to the city with the feeling that he was re-entering an arena. He went back oppressed by a sense of defeat, defeat which in some way must be converted into victory.

Those intervening weeks at Pine-Brae, after Torrie's departure, had been anything but happy weeks. The place seemed too permeated with her presence, too haunted with unexpectedly disturbing memories. He did what he could to purge it of these, by quietly yet studiously removing every possible trace of her, from the over-run kid-slippers which Skookum delighted in carrying into the open to the accordion-pleated silk underskirt, worn through at the edges, which still hung behind her bed- room door. But there were less material things which could not be hidden away, aromas and associations and reminiscences which reached out like unseen hands to draw him aside to that past on which he had determined to turn his back. And the loneliness of the old house, as the days grew shorter and the south-east winds brought the waves pounding mournfully and continually against the lake cliffs, became unendurable. So Storrow set about making his arrangements for departure. These kept him busy for a fortnight made doubly miserable by alternating snow and rain and wind, so that when he fi- nally landed in New York, still basking under a belated stretch of warm and balmy sunlight, it seemed like a mi- gration into a tumultuous but an infinitely merrier world.

Nor did Storrow return without a definitely mapped outline of conduct. He had known too much of drift- 338