Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/175

 plane with himself. But what Billy had told about Marjorie telephoning Rinderfeld and obeying him and quoting him suddenly gave Gregg a jerk of that alarming sensation known as "the creeps," which returned to him, in harder seizure later, when lost in one of those frank, picturesque, illuminating and self-informing pageants of hopes and fears which people call dreams.

In his room, Billy Whittaker lay awake long into that night, worried and utterly miserable. In his room, Gregg slept but dreamt horribly of Marjorie in a mire,—a black, steamy bog of fluid earth such as once, on a canoe trip into Canada, he saw suck down a frightened deer which had fled into it. His dream showed him Marjorie in that mire; it had caught her up to the shoulders; he could see her arms striking out as she attempted to swim. He could see her shoulders—her bare, white, lovely shoulders as they were that night of the Lovells' dance; and he knew that she was dressed, under the mire, in that new, beautiful, extreme dress her mother had bought for her and to which her father had objected in almost his last words before he left home for Clearedge Street. The black mire streaked her white shoulders but had not yet spattered her face; though it was up almost to her lips, he could see her face clearly and her hair arranged as it had been that night.

Now, in his dream, Gregg struggled to aid her; but he could not move for some one was holding him back. He fought and found that big arms clasped him and held him helpless; Russell's, they were; then they changed and became Bill's. And Bill overpowered him and pushed him away and picking up a scarf—that scarf which Marjorie had carried the night of the dance—he threw it over her shoulders; then, as Mar-