Page:Triangles of life, and other stories.djvu/206

194 I didn't get back to the hotel till daylight.

I hoped to find Mary asleep, and I went into the bedroom very softly. She was in bed, but she was awake. She took the thing so quietly that it made me uneasy. When an impulsive, determined little woman begins to take things very quietly, it's time for the man to straighten up and look out. She didn't even ask me where I'd been, and that made me more uneasy (I had a good yarn readied up), and when she spoke of a murder case in the Herald and asked me if I'd read the divorce case, where a wife sued her husband for drunkenness and adultery, I began to get scared. I wished she'd go for me, and have done with it, but she didn't. At last, at breakfast, she said—

"I think we'll go home to-day, Joe; we'll take the evening train from Redfern. You can get any business done that you want to do by that time."

And I thought so, too.

It was a miserable—journey one of the most dreary and miserable I ever made in my life. Both the children were peevish all the way. While there were other passengers in the carriage I couldn't talk to Mary, and when we were alone she wouldn't talk to me—except to answer yes and no.

The worst of it was that I didn't know what she thought, or how much she suspected. I wondered whether she believed that I had deceived her, and that worried me a lot. I hadn't been drinking much, and I came home sober that morning, so drink was no excuse for me being out all night. I thought once or twice that it would have been much better if I'd