I take a spot of this before I go to bed, do you?” Then he shot some seltzer in the glass and drank. And Eugene sat there, without a word, staring sullenly into the fire, dumbly conscious of the flood of sick pain and horror which the casual foulness of the man’s suggestion had aroused, stubbornly trying to deny now that he was thinking of the girl all the time.
LXXIII
One night, as Eugene was corning home along the dark road that went up past the playing field to the house, and that was bordered on each side by grand trees whose branches seemed to hold at night all the mysterious and demented cadences of storm, he came upon her suddenly standing in the shadow of a tree. It was one of the grand wild nights that seemed to come so often in the autumn of that year: the air was full of a fine stinging moisture, not quite rain, and above the stormy branches of the trees he could see the sky, wild, broken, full of scudding clouds through which at times the moon drove in and out with a kind of haggard loneliness. By that faint, wild, and broken light, he could see the small white oval of the girl’s face—somehow even more lovely now just because he could not see it plainly. And he could see as well the rough gleaming bark of the tree against which she leaned.
As he approached, he saw her thrust her hand into the pocket of her overcoat, a match flared, and for a moment he saw Edith plainly, the small flower of her face framed in the wavering light as she lowered her head to light her cigarette.
The light went out, he saw the small respiring glow of her cigarette before the white blur of her face, he passed her swiftly, head bent, without speaking, his heart filled with the sense of strangeness and wonder which the family had roused in him.
Then he walked on up the road, muttering to himself. The house was dark when he got there, but when he entered his sitting-room the place was still warmly and softly luminous with the glow of hot coals in the grate. He turned the lights on, shut the door behind him, and hurled several lumps of coal upon the bedded coals. In a moment the fire was blazing and crackling cheerfully, and getting a kind of comfort and satisfaction from this activity, he flung off his coat, went over to the sideboard, poured out a stiff drink of Scotch from a bottle there, and coming back to the fire, flung himself into a chair and began to stare sullenly into the dancing flames.
