o on.

While she dressed she listened anxiously for Amherst's step in the next
room; but there was no sound, and when she dragged herself downstairs
the drawing-room was empty, and the parlour-maid, after a decent delay,
came to ask if dinner should be postponed.

She said no, murmuring some vague pretext for her husband's absence, and
sitting alone through the succession of courses which composed the brief
but carefully-studied _menu_. When this ordeal was over she returned to
the drawing-room and took up a book. It chanced to be a new volume on
labour problems, which Amherst must have brought back with him from
Westmore; and it carried her thoughts instantly to the mills. Would
this disaster poison their work there as well as their personal
relation? Would he think of her as carrying contamination even into the
task their love had illumined?

The hours went on without his returning, and at length it occurred to
her that he might have taken the night train to Hanaford. Her heart
contracted at the thought: she remembered--though every nerve shrank
from the analogy--his sudden flight at another crisis in his life, and
she felt obscurely that if he escaped from her now she would never
recover her hold on him. But could he be so cruel--could he wish any one
to suffer as she was suffering?

At ten o'clock she could endure the drawing-room no longer, and went up
to her room again. She undressed slowly, trying to prolong the process
as much as possible, to put off the period of silence and inaction which
would close in on her when she lay down on her bed. But at length the
dreaded moment came--there was nothing more between her and the night.
She crept into bed and put out the light; but as she slipped between the
cold sheets a trembling seized her, and after a moment she drew on her
dressing-gown again and groped her way to the lounge by the fire.

She pushed the lounge closer to the hearth and lay down, still
shivering, though she had drawn the quilted coverlet up to her chin. She
lay there a long time, with closed eyes, in a mental darkness torn by
sudden flashes of memory. In one of these flashes a phrase of Amherst's
stood out--a word spoken at Westmore, on the day of the opening of the
Emergency Hospital, about a good-looking young man who had called to see
her. She remembered Amherst's boyish burst of jealousy, his sudden
relief at the thought that the visitor might have been Wyant. And no
doubt it _was_ Wyant--Wy