He wanted to know was she aware that an early train and an eight-o’clock breakfast required bags packed overnight?
Cissy was mildly surprised. “How _can_ I leave Emma at such a time?”
“Has she asked you to stay?” Thair rather brutally threw at her.
“I should think not—since she’s already asked two people whom she seems to want,—Mrs. Essington for one—myself for another.” He smiled diabolically.
Cissy gasped. “As an old friend, there are some things I might do for Emma—”
“My good Cicely, there’s only one thing you haven’t done. Do _go_, like a decent woman!”
“But the others?” She was injured. “Aren’t they going, too?”
“Oh, I guess they are,” he grinned, “if you mention it to ’em.”
She was indignant, but her departure was by the morning train that swept the house of all its guests.
Holden left with the others, but instead of traveling townward went to the hotel. He had seen Florence first.
He would like, he said, to escort her if she could let him know what day she was going up to San Francisco. He was thinking of the promise she had made him, that morning, driving out to the links. Through all the perplexing appearances of the last three days he had held by that as something tangible.
She did not know when she would be going; _could_ not tell him. Her pallor, her heavy eyes, the look she had, while she talked, of listening for something—all were eloquent to plead for her. He didn’t understand it, but he waited.
She was merely grateful to him that he let her alone. At the moment she was living so in another’s life that she seemed to own no separate existence. She seemed to waver between living and dying. When the relapse that followed the fever dropped him lowest, she felt herself reaching out toward death. When the crisis, passing, drifted him back, she felt herself quickened. The most she had ever wished, then seemed granted her.
Not only while she was with him, but when she was away, alone, she felt herself drawn somehow closer to him than ever before. She had forgotten the other people. She had forgotten the separation. While he lay, with the returning tide of living yet so low in him that he could hardly lift his eyelids, she was happy.
From half-consciousness Longacre roused, on the fourth day, to a clearer sense of what was around him. While Florence was in the room his eyes followed her as if fearful, should he turn them away, she would vanish. Twice he tried to ask a question, but the whisper failed him. Her ear to his mouth could not catch it.