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"If you don't leave the room instantly, I will! There's Papa Claude now. Let me pass!" It was not Papa Claude, however, to whom she opened the door. It was Estelle Linton, smartly attired for the day's expedition, and exhibiting all the compensating charms with which she sought to atone for her lack of brains and morals.
Reason formed no part in the encounter; no arbiter arose between the conflicting forces, between a gathering will to die and escape further torment, and the brute will to live, that must belong to every young creature, happy or wretched. The trial was long drawn out; but it had ended some hours before Estelle stood beside him.
Either accident had changed his purpose and frightened him elsewhere at the last moment, or the energies and activities that had gone to pile this accumulation were all spent in the process and now he did not need them. Then she looked further, to the extremity of the den he had made, and there, lying comfortably on a pile of shavings, Estelle found him.
Do the colours of babies' eyes change, like kittens' eyes, Ray?" "Haven't the slightest idea," he answered. "You may be quite sure I shall take care of it, Estelle, and see that it has everything it wants." "Somehow they're not pleased with you all the same," she answered. "I don't understand about it, but they evidently feel that you ought to have married Sabina.
I don't think that Farewell ever suspected me, but it is a fact that never once did he leave me alone in his study whilst I was at work there polishing the oak floor. And in the meanwhile I could see how he was pursuing my beautiful Estelle with his unwelcome attentions.
She exploded ideas in the ordered chambers of his mind. The proposition that labour was not a commodity quite took him off his balance. Yet he proved too logical to deny it when Estelle convinced his reason. "That fact belongs to the root of all the future, I believe," she said. "From it all the flowers and seed we hope for ought to come, and the interpretation of everything vital.
"What do you think of Estelle?" he asked. "I almost welcome this stupid collapse, nuisance though it is, because it's made a sort of resting-place and brought me nearer to you and Estelle. You've both been so kind. A man such as I am, is so busy and absorbed that he forgets all about women; then suddenly lying on his back done for and useless he finds they don't forget all about him."
He fell forward on his face and those of his men who heard and understood did likewise. Ruth, Alice and Estelle, who were watching the scene from a distant knoll, hardly understood what it was all about. They had thought no more shots would be fired when Paul began his charge, but one had boomed out, and surely that was a projectile winging its way toward the partly demolished hill.
It looked like it; he was very obviously embarrassed and flushed; he did not even try to meet her eyes. "The fact is," he went on, "I simply can't go without saying it, and you've been so awfully good to me you've let me feel we're friends." He paused, and Estelle leaned forward, her eyes melting with encouragement. "I am so glad you feel like that, Lionel," she murmured.
Estelle did not seem to have suffered in health; indeed, in Arthur's eyes, she seemed in these six weeks to have grown, and to have more colour, while her expression had become less childish, deeper, and higher.