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What would happen to her?... Howbeit, the ache that had tortured her became a dull, leaden pain, like that she had known at another time how long ago when the suffering caused by Ditmar's deception had dulled, when she had sat in the train on her way back to Hampton from Boston, after seeing Lise.
And always an essential function of this revelation, looming larger than ever in her consciousness, was Ditmar. It was for Ditmar they toiled, in Ditmar's hands were their very existences, his was the stupendous responsibility and power. As the afternoon wore, desire to see these toilers once more took possession of her.
Two figures chased one another around the centre table Ditmar's children! Was Ditmar there? Impelled irresistibly by a curiosity overcoming repugnance and fear, she went forward slowly across the street, gained the farther pavement, stepped over the concrete coping, and stood, shivering violently, on the lawn, feeling like an interloper and a thief, yet held by morbid fascination.
On summer evenings it had been Ditmar's habit when in Hampton to stroll about his lawn, from time to time changing the position of the sprinkler, smoking a cigar, and reflecting pleasantly upon his existence.
Her neck, where her hair grew in wisps behind her ear, seemed to burn: Ditmar's glance was focussed there. Her hands were cold as she wrote.... Then, like a deliverer, she saw young Caldwell coming in from the outer office, holding a card in his hand which he gave to Ditmar, who sat staring at it. "Siddons?" he said. "Who's Siddons?" Janet, who had risen, spoke up.
"It's a pity I didn't know you was coming, but I'll do my best," declared Mr. Hale, opening the door in the counter. "Oh, I guess you can fix us all right, if you want to, Eddie." "Mr. Ditmar's a great josher," Mr. Hale told Janet confidentially as he escorted them into the dining-room.
She had seen such people as these hurrying in automobiles through the ugliness of Faber Street in Hampton toward just such delectable spots as this village of Kingsbury people of that world of freedom and privilege from which she was excluded; Ditmar's world. He was at home here. But she? The delusion that she somehow had been miraculously snatched up into it was marred by their glances.
The hands of a delicate Georgian clock pointed to one. And in the large mirror behind the clock she beheld an image she supposed, dreamily, to be herself. The bell boy was taking off her coat, which he hung, with Ditmar's, on a rack in a corner. "Shall I light the fire, sir?" he asked. "Sure," said Ditmar. "And tell them to hurry up with lunch."
But to live, day after day, in the presence of that comfortless apathy!... Later in the morning she went out, to walk the streets, and again in the afternoon; and twice she turned her face eastward, in the direction of the Franco-Belgian Hall. Her courage failed her. How would these foreigners and the strange leaders who had come to organize them receive her, Ditmar's stenographer?
"We may be poor, but we come of good stock, as your father says." "It'll be all right Mr. Ditmar will behave like a gentleman," Edward assured her. "I thought I ought to tell you about it," Janet said, "but you mustn't mention it, yet, not even to Lise. Lise will talk. Mr. Ditmar's very busy now, he hasn't made any plans." "I wish Lise could get married!" exclaimed Hannah, irrelevantly.
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