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At first he rested, then idle and inert lay among the ferns on the top of the dump, staring at the distance, squinting up at the sky, deadened with the weight of the interminable, empty days. Chrystie had developed a liking for long walks. As she was a person of a lazy habit Lorry inquired about it and received the answer that walking was the easiest way to keep down your weight.
"I don't think things like that matter a bit, and I don't see at all what you're laughing at." "I'm laughing at Marquis de Lafayette. I can't help it something about his hands and his manners. They're so ponderously polite; maybe it's from waiting on table in the students' boarding house." "I never knew you were a snob before, Chrystie." "I guess I am. Isn't it awful?
They were to leave on Tuesday night, reaching Reno the next morning and there alighting for the marriage. He had chosen the night train as the least conspicuous. Chrystie could be shut up in a stateroom and he on guard outside where he could keep his eye on the door it was more like a kidnaping than an elopement. At other times he might have laughed, but he was far from laughing now.
It was a pity, for there were times when Chrystie, caught in a contrite mood and questioned, would have told. Such times generally came when she was preparing for one of her walks. At these moments her adventure had a way of suddenly losing its glamour and appearing as a shabby and underhand performance.
Listening to Lorry's account of the interview in the Argonaut Hotel, he disbelieved what the man had said, rejected her theory of his innocence. Chrystie nerved to a bold deception, the charges in the anonymous letter, all stood to him for signs of Mayer's guilt. He told her none of this, tried to cheer and reassure her, but he saw with a dark dread what might have happened.
Mayer four days later in the Plaza and go with him to see the orchids in the park greenhouse. The Holy Spirit orchid was in bloom and she had never seen it. A flower with such a name as the Holy Spirit seemed to Chrystie in some way to shed an element of propriety if not righteousness over the adventure.
"The young men of today seem to have forgotten their manners." "Forgotten them!" echoed Chrystie. "You can't forget what you never had." "Oh, do keep quiet," came unexpectedly from Lorry. "The heat in that place has given me a headache." Then they were contrite, for Lorry almost never had anything, and their attentions and inquiries had to be endured most of the way home.
He was her master, someone she feared, someone who could make her at one moment feel proud and glad, and at another small and trivial and apologetic. A majestic figure, a woman built on the grand plan, poor Chrystie paced through the silent rooms, weeping like a lost baby. When the dawn began to grow pale she went to the bedroom window and pulled up the blinds.
In the high tension of his nerves she was indescribably irritating, full of moods, preyed upon by gnawings of conscience. He had already given her an outline of his plan, tentatively suggested it you had to suggest things tentatively to Chrystie drawn lightly a romantic picture of their flight on the Overland to Reno.
It was the certainty of Lorry's disapproval that made secrecy necessary. He soon realized that Lorry was the governing force, the loved and feared dictator. But he was a cunning wooer. He put no ban upon confession if Chrystie wanted to tell he was the last person to stop it. And having placed the responsibility in her hands, he wove closer round the little fly the parti-colored web of illusion.
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