第73章 CHAPTER XI(5)

"I'll tell you what we'll do," he said, "we'll take a little run down to Boston and have dinner together. We'll be there in an hour, and back by ten o'clock."

"To Boston!" she repeated. "Now?"

"Why not?" he said, stopping the car. "Here's the road--it's a boulevard all the way."

It was not so much the proposal as the passion in his voice, in his touch, the passion to which she felt herself responding that filled her with apprehension and dismay, and yet aroused her pride and anger.

"I told you I had to be home," she said.

"I'll have you home by ten o'clock; I promise. We're going to be married, Janet," he whispered.

"Oh, if you meant to marry me you wouldn't ask me to do this!" she cried.

"I want to go back to Hampton. If you won't take me, I'll walk."

She had drawn away from him, and her hand was on the door. He seized her arm.

"For God's sake, don't take it that way!" he cried, in genuine alarm.

"All I meant was--that we'd have a nice little dinner. I couldn't bear to leave you, it'll be a whole week before we get another day. Do you suppose I'd--I'd do anything to insult you, Janet?"

With her fingers still tightened over the door-catch she turned and looked at him.

"I don't know," she said slowly. "Sometimes I think you would. Why shouldn't you? Why should you marry me? Why shouldn't you try to do with me what you've done with other women? I don't know anything about the world, about life. I'm nobody. Why shouldn't you?"

"Because you're not like the other women--that's why. I love you--won't you believe it?" He was beside himself with anxiety. "Listen--I'll take you home if you want to go. You don't know how it hurts me to have you think such things!"

"Well, then, take me home," she said. It was but gradually that she became pacified. A struggle was going on within her between these doubts of him he had stirred up again and other feelings aroused by his pleadings. Night fell, and when they reached the Silliston road the lights of Hampton shone below them in the darkness.

"You'd better let me out here," she said. "You can't drive me home."

He brought the car to a halt beside one of the small wooden shelters built for the convenience of passengers.

"You forgive me--you understand, Janet?" he asked.

"Sometimes I don't know what to think," she said, and suddenly clung to him. "I--I forgive you. I oughtn't to suspect such things, but I'm like that. I'm horrid and I can't help it." She began to unbutton the coat he had bought for her.

"Aren't you going to take it?" he said. "It's yours."

"And what do you suppose my family would say if I told them Mr. Ditmar had given it to me?"

"Come on, I'll drive you home, I'll tell them I gave it to you, that we're going to be married," he announced recklessly.

"Oh, no!" she exclaimed in consternation. "You couldn't. You said so yourself--that you didn't want, any one to know, now. I'll get on the trolley."

"And the roses?" he asked.

She pressed them to her face, and chose one. "I'll take this," she said, laying the rest on the seat....

He waited until he saw her safely on the trolley car, and then drove slowly homeward in a state of amazement. He had been on the verge of announcing himself to the family in Fillmore Street as her prospective husband! He tried to imagine what that household was like; and again he found himself wondering why she had not consented to his proposal. And the ever-recurring question presented itselfwas he prepared to go that length? He didn't know. She was beyond him, he had no clew to her, she was to him as mysterious as a symphony. Certain strains of her moved him intensely--the rest was beyond his grasp.... At supper, while his children talked and laughed boisterously, he sat silent, restless, and in spite of their presence the house seemed appallingly empty.

When Janet returned home she ran to her bedroom, and taking from the wardrobe the tissue paper that had come with her new dress, and which she had carefully folded, she wrapped the rose in it, and put it away in the back of a drawer. Thus smothered, its fragrance stifled, it seemed emblematic, somehow, of the clandestine nature of her love....

The weeks that immediately followed were strange ones. All the elements of life that previously had been realities, trivial yet fundamental, her work, her home, her intercourse with the family, became fantastic. There was the mill to which she went every day: she recognized it, yet it was not the same mill, nor was Fillmore Street the Fillmore Street of old.

Nor did the new and feverish existence over whose borderland she had been transported seem real, save in certain hours she spent in Ditmar's company, when he made her forget--hers being a temperament to feel the weight of an unnatural secrecy. She was aware, for instance, that her mother and even her father thought her conduct odd, were anxious as to her absences on certain nights and on Sundays. She offered no explanation. It was impossible. She understood that the reason why they refrained from questioning her was due to a faith in her integrity as well as to a respect for her as a breadwinner who lead earned a right to independence. And while her suspicion of Hannah's anxiety troubled her, on the occasions when she thought of it, Lise's attitude disturbed her even more. From Lise she had been prepared for suspicion, arraignment, ridicule. What a vindication if it were disclosed that she, Janet, had a lover--and that lover Ditmar! But Lise said nothing. She was remote, self-absorbed. Hannah spoke about it on the evenings Janet stayed at home.