Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/302

 of yours—to've kept himself straight as he'd keep you. And I sure never expected to breathe and see that."

Clara arose, her back to Marjorie and her wonderful hair fallen about her face for a screen. "Grab him off quick, I'm tellin' you," she repeated, almost like a threat. "Quick!"

When the light was out and they lay, each in her own bed, with the warm summer breeze blowing in through their three open windows, neither went easily to sleep. Clara had not mentioned Billy again but, as Marjorie lay quiet, after a lapse of time so great that Clara undoubtedly supposed her asleep, Marjorie heard a whisper: "Come, I've found you—don't you know? What have they been doing to you, Clara?" Then, savagely, "What have you done to her?"

Billy's words when he found her, except that in place of Marjorie's Clara was whispering her own name. And not all Clara had told of her own life—not all taken together—pierced Marjorie like that; and what made it more poignant was the knowledge that if Billy heard, he would not care. Clara! Why, he had come to take Marjorie away from such as her.

And Marjorie realized that he was continuing about that business now; yet her thoughts, as she lay awake, only occasionally went to him. Much of the night she considered Felix Rinderfeld and what he expected of her now—what he might have right to expect; and more she thought about Gregg, for whom Billy felt no further concern or cared to know even where he might be, because Gregg had kept faith with her against him.

On the night when she told Gregg that she was going away, she had not thought what it might entail to him; but it had lost him Billy; and Marjorie felt far more deeply than Billy himself what he was to Gregg. Per-