Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/66

56 "Silly!" she returned smiling, "and it isn't a pretty frock. I can't wear pretty frocks any longer," she added mournfully.

He dropped his eyes before the flush that sprang into her cheeks, and left the room hurriedly.

His shame followed him about all day, dogging him like a shadow. It lurked in corners and leaped out upon him. Sometimes it crept away and hovered in the remoter distance; he had almost forgotten its attendance; and then in the thick of his laughing conversation it fell upon him black once more. It skulked ever within call, dwindled at times, grey and insignificant. When he stopped to exchange a sentence in the street, it slid away; he moved on solitary, and it ran out before him, dark and portentous. Remorse bit deep into him, remorse and a certain fear of discovery. The hours with his wife were filled with uneasy thoughts, and he would fain have variegated the cheerless monotony of his conscience by adding a guest to his dinner-table. But from this course he was deterred by delicacy; for, at his suggestion, Letty looked at him, winced a little, smiled ever so faintly, and, with an ineffable expression of tender embarrassment, drew her dressing-gown closer round her body. He could not press the indignity upon her young and sensitive mind.

But the fall of night, which he had so dreaded, brought him a change of mood. The table was stocked with the fine fruits of a rare intelligence; the plate shone with the white linen; and all the comforts waited upon his appetite. It was no gross content that overtook him, but the satisfaction of a body gently appeased. His sin had faded wonderfully into the distance, had grown colder, and no longer burned intolerably upon his conscience. He found himself at times regarding it with reluctant equanimity. He stared at it with the eyes of a judicial stranger. Men