He went quietly into the guest chamber across the hall.
She waited through a leaden period. Then, moved by an impulse she did
not attempt to define, a mixture of motives, pity for him, a craving for
the outlet of words, a desire to set herself right before him, she
slipped on a dressing robe and crossed the hall. The door swung open
noiselessly. Fyfe sat slumped in a chair, hat pulled low on his
forehead, hands thrust deep in his pockets. He did not even look up. His
eyes stared straight ahead, absent, unseeingly fixed on nothing. He
seemed to be unconscious of her presence or to ignore it,--she could not
tell which.
"Jack," she said. And when he made no response she said again,
tremulously, that unyielding silence chilling her, "Jack."
He stirred a little, but only to take off his hat and lay it on a table
beside him. With one hand pushing back mechanically the straight,
reddish-tinged hair from his brow, he looked up at her and said briefly,
in a tone barren of all emotion:
"Well?"
She was suddenly dumb. Words failed her utterly. Yet there was much to
be said, much that was needful to say. They could not go on with a cloud
like that over them, a cloud that had to be dissipated in the crucible
of words. Yet she could not begin. Fyfe, after a prolonged silence,
seemed to grasp her difficulty. Abruptly he began to speak, cutting
straight to the heart of his subject, after his fashion.
"It's a pity things had to take his particular turn," said he.
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