Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/266

256 were wrinkled, and even in the dim light of the fat man's lamp, which he left with Reba, she could see that the grimy spread had an oily stain on the center of it. On the edge of the untidy commode there was a half-smoked cigar, and an empty bottle beside it. But she locked herself in, with all this squalor, with no word of complaint to the proprietor. When the sound of his footsteps had died away, along the labyrinthine corridors, Reba went over to the window and raised it, placing the piece of kindling-wood which she had found upon the sill, beneath the sash to keep it up. Then she drew the only chair, converted from a porch-rocker into a straight-backed, short-legged affair, close to the window, and sat down.

She could not lie down, of course—not on that bed. She could not undress in such a place. She did take off the white suede pumps, however, smeared and begrimed now from her long walk, and placed them side by side at the foot of the bed. Then as quickly as possible she blew out the lamp, covering with a blanket of darkness the awful surroundings.

It flashed across the tortured Reba that to find herself in such a bedroom as this, forced to listen to the laughter, and shrill, delirious shrieks that issued now and again from the bar-room below, her eyes still smarting from what she had seen in that bar-room, was but the just outcome of her relations with Chadwick Booth. The forbiddenness of those relations loomed up before Reba in enormous proportions.

Why, he had never meant to marry her! It had never even occurred to him to make her his wife! And she—she—had let herself drink deep and long of the permeating sweetness of every one of his