"Thank you, old boy--I'll go back to Hoover"--he looked hesitatingly at the profile of Nancy--"Hoover thinks it's all rather droll, you know--Good-bye, old boy! Good-bye, Nancy."
She turned and said "good-bye." He stepped toward her--seeming to her to slink as he walked--but he held out his hand and she gave him her own, cold, and unyielding. He went out, with a last awkward "Good-bye, old chap!" to Allan.
Nancy turned to face her husband, putting out her hands to him. He had removed from its envelope the letter Bernal had left him, and seemed about to put it rather hastily into his pocket, but she seized it playfully, not noting that his hand gave it up with a certain reluctance, her eyes upon his face.
"No more business to-night--we have to talk. Oh, I must tell you so much that has troubled me and made me doubt, my dear--and my poor mind has been up and down like a see-saw. I wonder it's not a wreck. Come, put away your business--there." She placed the letter and its envelope on the desk.
An hour they were there, lingering in talk--talking in a circle; for at regular intervals Nancy must return to this: "I believe no wife ever goes away until there is absolutely no shred of possibility left--no last bit of realness to hold her. But now I know your stanchness."
"Really, Nance--I can't tell you how much you please me."
There was a knock at the door. They looked at each other bewildered.
"The telephone, sir," said the maid in response to Allan's tardy "Come in."
When he had gone, whistling cheerily, she walked nervously about the room, studying familiar objects from out of her animated meditation.
Coming to his desk, she snuggled affectionately into his chair and gazed fondly over its litter of papers. With a little instinctive move to bring somewhat of order to the chaos, she reached forward, but her elbow brushed to the floor two or three letters that had lain at the edge of the desk.
As she stooped to pick up the fallen papers the letter Bernal had left lay open before her, a letter written in long, slanting but vividly legible characters. And then, quite before she recognised what letter it was, or could feel curious concerning it, the first illuminating line of it had flashed irrevocably to her mind's centre.