Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/640



HE next day was Sunday—a pleasant, sunshiny Sunday at home in Kent—and by an early hour Dora's two jailers were setting her prison-house in order, not, as jailer nature goes, unkindly, against her return.

During the lonely hours of his journey from Paris, in the first contentment of finding himself back upon his farm, a good deal of Steven's anger against his wife had softened. Belief in her was shattered; but what, if he looked into the matter narrowly, had his belief in her been for many a week past? Was the act of wearing the blue and silver very much worse than the desire to wear it? Was the dress itself, as Dora, unconscious of irony, had asked, worse than every ball-dress she had worn during the last two months? Finally, was she not a creature to be judged by the rules of a world utterly out of his comprehension; a creature with less than a child's responsibility (Katharine's cousin, too!) and here in Ashcot would not her small feet, by very want of the possibility of temptation, be forced for the future to walk straight? Such were Steven's reflections. As he made them he repented him of his harshness; nay, felt himself cowardly for having been betrayed into it, as a man feels who in a moment of haste has struck a child. And on Saturday, during the very hours when his wife, sullen and hopeless, was sitting by the fire at the Hotel de Rivoli, had ridden over to Canterbury and hired a piano, a work-table, and half a dozen other knickknacks that Dora on former occasions had declared to be necessary to her existence at Ashcot.

"You'll need to build a new house over your head soon, Steven!" said Barbara, as she looked around the altered parlor next morning—the Sunday morning when Dora was expected back. "What with all this new foolishness down stairs, and a dozen or so of them Frenchified clothes boxes up, the kitchen 'll soon be the only room in the house large enough for full-grown folk to turn round in."

Steven answered good-humoredly that Paris had given him ample experience of rooms in which "full-grown folk" could neither turn round nor stand upright, and yet live. Then, Barbara betaking herself to the kitchen to see after the extra good breakfast which by the master's orders she was preparing, he went out into the sunny front garden, lit his pipe, and began to saunter up and down in the path that led toward the road—the path along which, in imagination, he had come back from work (on that evening when he listened to Klaus' story in Mex-