第105章

And for how long was she to be able to control these impulses? This time she had prevailed once more against that other impetuous self of hers.Would she prevail the next time? And in these struggles, was she growing stronger as she overcame, or weaker? She did not know.She tore the note into fragments, and making a heap of them in the pen tray, burned them carefully.

During the week following upon this, Laura found her trouble more than ever keen.She was burdened with a new distress.The incident of the note to Corthell, recalled at the last moment, had opened her eyes to possibilities of the situation hitherto unguessed.She saw now what she might be capable of doing in a moment of headstrong caprice, she saw depths in her nature she had not plumbed.Whether these hidden pitfalls were peculiarly hers, or whether they were common to all women placed as she now found herself, she did not pause to inquire.She thought only of results, and she was afraid.

But for the matter of that, Laura had long since passed the point of deliberate consideration or reasoned calculation.The reaction had been as powerful as the original purpose, and she was even yet struggling blindly, intuitively.

For what she was now about to do she could give no reason, and the motives for this final and supreme effort to conquer the league of circumstances which hemmed her in were obscure.She did not even ask what they were.She knew only that she was in trouble, and yet it was to the cause of her distress that she addressed herself.Blindly she turned to her husband;and all the woman in her roused itself, girded itself, called up its every resource in one last test, in one ultimate trial of strength between her and the terrible growing power of that blind, soulless force that roared and guttered and sucked, down there in the midst of the city.

She alone, one unaided woman, her only auxiliaries her beauty, her wit, and the frayed, strained bands of a sorely tried love, stood forth like a challenger, against Charybdis, joined battle with the Cloaca, held back with her slim, white hands against the power of the maelstrom that swung the Nations in its grip.

In the solitude of her room she took the resolve.Her troubles were multiplying; she, too, was in the current, the end of which was a pit--a pit black and without bottom.Once already its grip had seized her, once already she had yielded to the insidious drift.

Now suddenly aware of a danger, she fought back, and her hands beating the air for help, turned towards the greatest strength she knew.

"I want my husband," she cried, aloud, to the empty darkness of the night."I want my husband.I will have him; he is mine, he is mine.There shall nothing take me from him; there shall nothing take him from me."Her first opportunity came upon a Sunday soon afterward.Jadwin, wakeful all the Saturday night, slept a little in the forenoon, and after dinner Laura came to him in his smoking-room, as he lay on the leather lounge trying to read.His wife seated herself at a writing-table in a corner of the room, and by and by began turning the slips of a calendar that stood at her elbow.At last she tore off one of the slips and held it up.

"Curtis."

"Well, old girl?"

"Do you see that date?"

He looked over to her.

"Do you see that date? Do you know of anything that makes that day different--a little--from other days?

It's June thirteenth.Do you remember what June thirteenth is?"Puzzled, he shook his head.

"No--no."

Laura took up a pen and wrote a few words in the space above the printed figures reserved for memoranda.Then she handed the slip to her husband, who read aloud what she had written.

"'Laura Jadwin's birthday.' Why, upon my word," he declared, sitting upright."So it is, so it is.June thirteenth, of course.And I was beast enough not to realise it.Honey, I can't remember anything these days, it seems.""But you are going to remember this time?" she said.