Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/303

 For this was the day when Adam John must appear for sentence.

But after a little she moved over to speak to Henry and was horrified to find herself gazing at a mere wreck, a ruin of a man. His face had grayed and shrunken; there were dark hollows under his eyes. His light brown hair, usually so carefully brushed, was disheveled and stuck up at angles. The accustomed clear white of his eyes was bloodshot. There was a looseness, a trembling of the lips. His was the face of a man upon whom despair had come, into whose mind utter disillusionment had crushed. The light in his pupils, as he stared out at her, was—eccentric. He did not greet her, confess that he had missed her, or ask her what she had been doing. He accepted her presence simply as something for which he was mutely grateful, and upon the surface of his mind there broke into speech the only thing that mattered: "She didn't come!" he whispered solemnly as if awed by the immensity of some spiritual catastrophe. "She didn't come!"

Lahleet pressed her beating heart.

She loved Henry Harrington—loved him. She had kept away from him these four days purely from pride. It was not her place to be chief comforter to him so long as he looked for his chief comfort to another—but when he turned to her! Oh, how she could devote herself to him then! She, with her headlong courage in her veins; she, reckless daredevil, passionate, capable of savage abandon! Once the other woman failed, she would find a way to clear her lover from this absurd entanglement—at no matter what cost to herself. He would be hers then—worth everything