Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/129

 was to visit the hospital. When she arrived, she learned that her father's improvement continued and that she would be allowed to see him for five minutes.

She found him very white in his narrow, white bed in the little, private room, with a nurse beside him; but he was conscious and his head was clear and, indeed, he was not unlike himself. His eyes met hers and gazed into hers in his old, loving manner; his lips smiled at her in fond reassurance.

"I'm going to be all right again soon, Margy," he said, clasping tighter on her hand which she slipped into his.

That weak pressure almost made her cry; and she tossed back her head and shook her tears away. How could he have sinned, as he had, and kept his conscience so clear? Yet it was not strange that his manner toward her had not changed, she reflected after a minute; for she was certain that Doctor Grantham would not yet have informed him of her presence at Clearedge Street; and he was not more guilty to-day than last week or last month or before. The change was in herself, because she had learned; and she wondered if she had never known him with a clear conscience or whether, if she knew the world as Rinderfeld did, she would believe that men like her father regarded his sin so lightly that it cast no cloud over their consciences and that its effect upon them was only the fear of scandal.

She would not let Billy accompany her home; and, starting away alone in the taxicab, she passed another, approaching the hospital, and having one passenger, a woman. Marjorie had only a glimpse of her and more of her figure than her face, but she half leaped from her seat in the certainty that the woman was Mrs. Russell.