Laura rose and paced the floor, her hands pressed together over her heart. She was excited, her cheeks flushed, a certain breathless exhilaration came and went within her breast, and in place of the intolerable ennui of the last days, there came over her a sudden, an almost wild animation, and from out her black eyes there shot a kind of furious gaiety.
But she was aroused by a step at the door. The messenger stood there, a figure ridiculously inadequate for the intensity of all that was involved in the issue of the hour—a weazened, stunted boy, in a uniform many sizes too large.
Laura, seated at her desk, held the note towards him resolutely. Now was no time to hesitate, to temporise. If she did not hold to her resolve now, what was there to look forward to? Could one’s life be emptier than hers—emptier, more intolerable, more humiliating?
“Take this note to that address,” she said, putting the envelope and a coin in the boy’s hand. “Wait for an answer.”
The boy shut the letter in his book, which he thrust into his breast pocket, buttoning his coat over it. He nodded and turned away.
Still seated, Laura watched him moving towards the door. Well, it was over now. She had chosen. She had taken the leap. What new life was to begin for her tomorrow? What did it all mean? With an inconceivable rapidity her thoughts began racing through, her brain.
She did not move. Her hands, gripped tight together, rested upon the desk before her. Without turning her head, she watched the retreating messenger, from under her lashes. He passed out of the door, the curtain fell behind him.
And only then, when the irrevocableness of the step was all but an accomplished fact, came the reaction.
“Stop!” she cried, springing up. “Stop! Come back here. Wait a moment.”
What had happened? She could neither understand nor explain. Somehow an instant of clear vision had come, and in that instant a power within her that was herself and not herself, and laid hold upon her will. No, no, she could not, she could not, after all. She took the note back.
“I have changed my mind,” she said, abruptly. “You may keep the money. There is no message to be sent.”
As soon as the boy had gone she opened the envelope and read what she had written. But now the words seemed the work of another mind than her own. They were unfamiliar; they were not the words of the Laura Jadwin she knew. Why was it that from the very first hours of her acquaintance with this man, and in every circumstance of their intimacy, she had always acted upon impulse? What was there in him that called into being all that was reckless in her?
And for how long was she to be able to control these impulses? This time she had prevailed once more against that other impetuous self of hers. Would she prevail the next time? And in these struggles, was she growing stronger as she overcame, or weaker? She did not know. She tore the note into fragments, and making a heap of them in the pen tray, burned them carefully.
During the week following upon this, Laura found her trouble more than ever keen. She was burdened with a new distress. The incident of the note to Corthell, recalled at the last moment, had opened her eyes to possibilities of the situation hitherto unguessed. She saw now what she might be capable of doing in a moment of headstrong caprice, she saw depths in her nature she had not plumbed. Whether these hidden pitfalls were peculiarly hers, or whether they were common to all women placed as she now found herself, she did not pause to inquire. She thought only of results, and she was afraid.
But for the matter of that, Laura had long since passed the point of deliberate consideration or reasoned calculation. The reaction had been as powerful as the original purpose, and she was even yet struggling blindly, intuitively.
For what she was now about to do she could give no reason, and the motives for this final and supreme effort to conquer the league of circumstances which hemmed her in were obscure. She did not even ask what they were. She knew only that she was in trouble, and yet it was to the cause of her distress that she addressed herself. Blindly she turned to her husband; and all the woman in her roused itself, girded itself, called up its every resource in one last test, in one ultimate trial of strength between her and the terrible growing power of that blind, soulless force that roared and guttered and sucked, down there in the midst of the city.
She alone, one unaided woman, her only auxiliaries her beauty, her wit, and the frayed, strained bands of a sorely tried love, stood forth like a challenger, against Charybdis, joined battle with the Cloaca, held back with her slim, white hands against the power of the maelstrom that swung the Nations in its grip.
In the solitude of her room she took the resolve. Her troubles were multiplying; she, too, was in the current, the end of which was a pit—a pit black and without bottom. Once already its grip had seized her, once already she had yielded to the insidious drift. Now suddenly aware of a danger, she fought back, and her hands beating the air for help, turned towards the greatest strength she knew.
“I want my husband,” she cried, aloud, to the empty darkness of the night. “I want my husband. I will have him; he is mine, he is mine. There shall nothing take me from him; there shall nothing take him from me.”
Her first opportunity came upon a Sunday soon afterward. Jadwin, wakeful all the Saturday night, slept a little in the forenoon, and after dinner Laura came to him in his smoking-room,
