Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/76

596, as though she drove them to pronounce the words by a supreme effort, "and hear the story that I have to tell. If you still want me when you've heard it I will give myself to you, but"—he heard the castanet-sharp clicking of her chattering teeth as a shivering tremor shook her—"it is more likely you will loathe me, never want to touch or see or think of me again."

"Ismet" he began again, but—

"Please, Hugh!" she begged.

Throughout the ride back from the shore she sat beside him silent, hands clasped in lap, all feeling gone from her face. Once while they waited for a traffic light to change he leant toward her and saw her eyes, fixed, fearful, set, as though they stared at something just beyond their range of vision, something dreadful, nameless, horrible.

For the first time since they'd met she did not give him her hand in farewell; instead she offered him a little smile so sad, so frightened and so pleading that his heart ached at it.

as he would Hugh could not force his feet to hasten as he dismounted from the bus and turned down the side street where Ismet lived. Fear, vague and formless as the specter of a specter, haunted him; dull dread seemed treading on his heels; he felt the icy touch of Nemesis upon his inward consciousness. An undefined but sure sense of impending tragedy was on him. Ismet loved him, she had told him so; yet not only had she refused to marry him, she had forbidden him to touch her till what could it be, this thing that she had tried to tell him since the night they met? Something dreadful "You may loathe me when you've heard," she'd said. He searched his memory for some clue, but found no hint to help him. She had been introduced to him as Madame Foulik. Perhaps she was still married, not widowed or divorced. He smiled a trifle grimly. If that were all! Did she think he'd let some miserable, misguided follower of the False Prophet stand between them? Perhaps she'd fled the harem with a lover; he'd heard of such things The thought chilled him an instant, but he brushed it by. He had been with her all summer, he knew her as he'd never known another woman; he'd stake his life on her innate purity. "And even if she has been indiscreet, I love her as she is, not as she was," he told himself aloud.

Across the west the last faint rays of sunset soaked and spread through a streak of gray cloud like blood that stains a sodden bandage. Lights flashed through the purplish fog of autumn twilight and the dry leaves of the street-side trees beat on each other with a crackling rustle like the folding of a newspaper. From the corner came the stutter of a hurdy-gurdy rendering a song favorite:

It was not the chill of autumn evening that made Abernathy shiver. "No harm done?" If what she had to tell him kept them from each other, left him only memories of their five months together, he knew that even if he moved and talked and carried out the business of life he'd be a zombie—a body moving without heart or soul or hope or will to live.

His breath came faster as he neared her door, and he felt a wave of panic weakness spreading through him, swelling from his heart until it reached his