CHAPTER XXII

Kimberly followed her through the open door. "Where are you going?" he asked. Her answer came in her quickened step. He repeated his words without eliciting any response. Then he stepped directly in front of her in the path. "Stop for one moment. Alice, you can't go any farther while you are as angry at me as you are now."

"I am Alice to no one but my husband," she exclaimed controlling herself as well as she could. "You shall not stop me, you have no right to."

"Where are you going?"

"I am going home."

"Listen; you are Alice to me--now, and forever; remember that."

Her knees trembled as she strove to escape him. She tried to pass through the shrubbery and could not. She felt faint and dizzy. The very world had changed with a kiss. Everything in life seemed upset, every safeguard gone.

He took her arm. "Come back to the path, Alice. We must walk it together."

She paused an instant for breath and made an effort to speak as she put his hand angrily away. "I insist," she cried, "that you do not continue to insult me."

"If you wait for me to insult you, Alice, you will wait a long time. I should be as likely to insult my own mother."

"I have done nothing to deserve this," she sobbed, frantic with confusion.

"You deserve more a thousand times than my devotion ever can bring you. But all it can ever bring, from the moment I kissed you, is yours."

Her eyes blazed through her tears. In her helpless wrath she stamped her foot. "You are shameless. I detest your conduct. If you are going to the house I will stay here. If you are not, let me go."

He met her denunciation with steadiness. "Nothing you can say will anger me."

"You mean you have no respect for me." She spoke so fast she could scarcely frame the words. "Why don't you say so? Are you too cowardly?"

The imputation stung him. He seemed to explode inwardly. "I have nothing _but_ respect for you, Alice," he insisted with terrifying energy, "but this thing must be fought out----"

She attempted to speak. His words drowned her. "I want to say nothing that will wound or offend you. You make it very hard for me to speak at all----"

"You have no right to speak----"

"But, Alice," he exclaimed, throwing all his force into the words, "you don't love that man. That is why I speak. If you _did_ love him, if even he loved you, I could be silent."

"I love my husband as a wife should," she cried, struggling vainly to escape his accusation.

"You do not. You cannot!"

They spoke at white heat, she fighting vainly to control her trembling limbs and Kimberly pausing at times to deal better his sledge-hammer blows at her pitiful strength.

"You do not love that man. If I believed you did," he spoke with a bitterness she had never heard before, "I should never want to see another sun rise. I respect you above all women that breathe; but in that I am right, I can't be wrong. I have suppressed and stifled and smothered as long as I can and it will come out!"

"I will not hear you!"

"Sometime, somewhere, you will hear me. Don't speak!" he exclaimed vehemently. The veins knotted upon his forehead. "I forgot myself for a moment. If you knew what it costs me to remember! But, Alice, for me it is you--or nothing in this world. Remember! You or nothing!"

She searched his face for pity. "I am sinking with shame. What further, what more humiliation do you want? We are in plain view of the house. I am utterly helpless. Will you not have the decency to leave me?"

"I wish I could have said this better; I do nothing well. If I have hurt you, I am very, very sorry." He strode away toward the garden.

Trying to compose herself, Alice walked to the house. Providentially, Dolly had already started for the field. Summoning a servant, Alice ordered her car and with her head whirling started for home. As she was hurried over the country road her mind gradually righted itself, and strange thoughts ran like lightning flashes through her brain. Reaching home, she hastened upstairs and locked her door.

What startled her most painfully in her reflections was the unwelcome conviction that there was nothing new, nothing surprising in her situation. Nothing, at least, except this violent outburst which she now realized she ought long ago to have foreseen. She was suddenly conscious that she had long known Kimberly loved her, and that one day he would call her to account--for the crime of being loved in spite of herself, she reflected bitterly.

She threw herself on her couch and held her hands upon her burning temples. He had caught her in his arms and forced a kiss upon her. The blood suffused her face at the recollection. Again and again, though she turned from the picture, imagination brought it back. She saw his eyes as he bent over her; the thought of the moment was too much to support. Her very forehead crimsoned as the scene presented itself. And worse, was the realizing that something of fascination lingered in the horror of that instant of amazement and fear and mad repulsion of his embrace. She hid her face in her pillow.

After a time she grew calmer, and with her racing pulse quieted, her emotion wore itself somewhat out. Saner thoughts asserted themselves. She felt that she could fight it out. She searched her heart and found no wantonness within it. Strongly assailed, and not, she felt, through her own fault, she would fight and resist. He had challenged her when he had said it should be fought out. She, too, resolved it should be.

She bathed her forehead, and when she felt sure of herself, rang for Annie. Lunch was served in her room, but she could eat nothing. At moments she felt the comforting conviction of having settled her mind. Unhappily, her mind would not stay settled. Nothing would stay settled. No mood that brought relief would remain. The blood came unbidden to her cheeks even while Annie was serving her and her breath would catch at the opening of a door.

When she heard the hum of a motor-car on the open highway her heart jumped. She opened the porch doors and went out to where she could look on the lake. Her eyes fell upon the distant Towers and her anger against Kimberly rose. She resolved he should realize how he had outraged her self-respect. She picked from the troubled current of her thought cutting things that she ought to have said. She despised herself for not having more angrily resented his conduct, and determined, if he dared further persist, to expose him relentlessly to the circle of their friends, even if they were his own relations. There should be no guilty secret between them; this, at least, she could insure.

When the telephone bell rang, Annie answered it. Dolly was calling for Alice and went into a state when told that Alice had come home affected by the heat, and had given up and gone to bed; she hoped yet, Annie said, to be all right for the evening. Fritzie took the wire at Black Rock to ask what she could do, and Annie assured her there was nothing her mistress needed but quiet and rest.

When the receiver had been hung up the first bridge was crossed, for Alice was resolved above all things not to be seen that night at the dance. When Fritzie came back to Cedar Lodge to dress, Alice was still in bed. Her room was darkened and Annie thought she might be sleeping. At dinner-time, MacBirney, who had been in town all day, came in to see how she was. She told her husband that he would have to go to Dolly's with Fritzie.

MacBirney bent over his wife and kissed her, greatly to her mental discomfort. An unwelcome kiss from him seemed to bring back more confusingly the recollection of Kimberly's kiss, and to increase her perplexities. She detested her husband's caresses; they meant no real affection and she did not intend he should think she believed they did. But she never could decide where to draw the line with him, and was divided between a desire to keep him always at a distance and a wish not to seem always unamiable.

Fritzie, after she was dressed, tiptoed in. The room was lighted to show Alice the new gown. It was one of their spring achievements, and Alice raised herself on her pillow to give a complete approval of the effect. "It is a stunning thing; simply stunning. If you would only stop running yourself to death, Fritzie, and put on ten pounds, you would be absolute perfection."

"If I stopped running myself to death what would there be to live for?" demanded Fritzie, refastening the last pin in her Dresden girdle. "We all have to live for something."

Alice put her hand to her head. "I wonder what I have to live for?"

Fritzie turned sharply. "You? Why nothing but to spend your money and have a good time. Too bad about you, isn't it? You'll soon have a million a year for pin-money."

Alice shook her head. "A dozen millions a year would not interest me, Fritzie."

Fritzie laughed. "Don't be too sure, my dear; not too sure. Well," Fritzie's hands ran carefully over her hair for the last time, "there are a lot of men coming over from the Sound to-night. I may meet my fate!"

"I wish you may with all my heart, Fritzie. Why is it fates always come to people that don't want them?"

"Don't you believe it," cried Fritzie, "they do want them."

"They don't--not always."

"Don't you ever believe it--they only say they don't or think they don't!" she exclaimed, with accustomed vehemence.

Alice moved upon her pillow in impatient disapproval. "I hope you'll have a good time to-night."

MacBirney was ready and Fritzie joined him. The house grew quiet after they left. Annie brought up a tray and Alice took a cup of broth. She did not long resist the drowsiness that followed. She thought vaguely for a moment of a prayer for safety. But her married life had long excluded prayer. What good could come of praying to be kept unharmed while living in a state that had in itself driven her from prayer? That, at least, would be too absurd, and with a dull fear gnawing and dying alternately at her heart she fell asleep.