How could women mope and moan because they
were cast out, and try to scratch their way back where they were not
welcome? How could any woman do that? Sometimes, she wondered whether,
if Fiorsen died, she would marry her lover. What difference would it
make? She could not love him more. It would only make him feel, perhaps,
too sure of her, make it all a matter of course. For herself, she would
rather go on as she was. But for him, she was not certain, of late had
been less and less certain. He was not bound now, could leave her when
he tired! And yet--did he perhaps feel himself more bound than if they
were married--unfairly bound? It was this thought--barely more than the
shadow of a thought--which had given her, of late, the extra gravity
noticed by her father.
In that unlighted room with the moonbeams drifting in, she sat down
at Summerhay's bureau, where he often worked too late at his cases,
depriving her of himself. She sat there resting her elbows on the bare
wood, crossing her finger-tips, gazing out into the moonlight, her mind
drifting on a stream of memories that seemed to have beginning only from
the year when he came into her life. A smile crept out on her face, and
now and then she uttered a little sigh of contentment.
So many memories, nearly all happy! Surely, the most adroit work of the
jeweller who put the human soul together was his provision of its power
to forget the dark and remember sunshine.
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