Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/395

Rh whispers of vanity, of selﬁshness, of worldly pride, might have drawn their freezing ring about Bessy’s heart.…

Justine started up to follow her … then paused, recalling her last words. “Let us not talk now—I can’t!” She had no right to intrude on that bleeding privacy—if the chance had been hers she had lost it. She dropped back into her seat at the desk, hiding her face in her hands.

Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the correspondence she had dropped.… It was hard at ﬁrst to collect her thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard ground—frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.

As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a woman’s ﬁgure riding down the avenue toward the gate. The ﬁgure disappeared behind a clump of evergreens—showed again farther down, through the boughs of a skeleton beech—and revealed itself in the next open space as Bessy—Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring [ 379 ]