She bent to me with her hands half-up, frightened a little at the look in my face:
'What is it?' she said. 'What's the matter?'
She came close to me anxiously.
'What is it, dear?' she said, 'Oh, do tell me! What's the mat-ter with you, dear? Are you ill?'
'Nothing's the matter with me,' I said. It's time we were going to bed … There, there! It's all right, I tell you. Now, off you go to bed! You're tired out.'
I took her hand and patted it between my two; and then led her, strutting with fantastic, playful gallantry, to the door-way and held up one curtain for her to pass. Just through it, she turned her head and shoulders back and asked prettily:
'But you will come, too—soon?'
'Yes,' I said, smiling at her, 'I have something that I must do, that will take me a few minutes, and then I will come.'
I let fall the curtain. In a moment I heard her step go on.
Then I sat down in the easy-chair and began to think: to think of all this and what it meant, and then of the events of that far night of supreme folly at Rayne's, or best say madness at once.
Something which I had to do was now done—done well, as it seemed to me, and that something was the final and complete clearing away of all the clouding illusion that had blackened the sight of that strange time of devilry, had dimmed the sight of the time that had followed upon the other as an oblivious summer upon an intoxicated spring. I was at last free. I saw things as they were, not as they seemed to be. It might well be that illusion would play its part in my future's wilder hours; but it never could be what it had been to the daily hours of my past. I was free. And that, I thought, meant something.
I blew out the candles and drew back the hearthrug (for fear of some hot coals falling out of Rosy's specially procured English grate, and burning her and me and the house, and my so significant freedom in the night), and then went in to her.
She was already in bed, lying on her side, looking to
