His return to public life would now be too late to help to
avert disaster, he must just stand aside in these last weeks of the
session and see the shipwreck. An unspeakable bitterness invaded his
spirit. The moon was rising when he got outside, one day beyond its
full. It seemed like a golden ball in the twilight of opal tints, before
it should rise in its silver majesty to supreme command of the night.
Nature was in one of her most sensuously divine moods. The summer and
fulfillment had come.
John Derringham sat down in a comfortable chair and gazed in front of
him.
There had been moonlight, too, when he had spent those exquisite hours
with his love, now six weeks ago--a young half moon. Could it be only
six weeks? A lifetime of anguish appeared to have rolled between. And
where was she? Then, for the first time, the crust of his
self-absorption seemed to crumble, and he thought with new stabs of pain
how she, too, must have suffered. He began to picture her waiting by the
gate--she would be brave and quiet. And then, as the day passed--what
had she done? He could not imagine, but she must have suffered
intolerably.
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