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Page 94
"Old stuff!" she said coolly, and walked off. But there was a tug of
fear at her heart. She told Mabel, but it was typical of the change
that Mabel only shrugged her shoulders.
It was Lethway's shrewdness that led to his next move. He had tried
bullying, and failed. He had tried fear, with the same lack of
effect. Now he tried kindness.
She distrusted him at first, but her starved heart was crying out
for the very thing he offered her. As the weeks went on, with no
news of Cecil, she accepted his death stoically at last. Something
of her had died. But in a curious way the boy had put his mark on
her. And as she grew more like the thing he had thought her to be
the gulf between Mabel and herself widened. They had, at last, only
in common their room, their struggle, the contacts of their daily
life.
And Lethway was now always in the background. He took her for quiet
meals and brought her home early. He promised her that sometime he
would see that she got back home.
"But not just yet," he added as her colour rose. "I'm selfish,
Edith. Give me a little time to be happy."
That was a new angle. It had been a part of the boy's quiet creed to
make others happy.
"Why don't you give me something to do, since you're so crazy to
have me hanging about?"
"Can't do it. I'm not the management. And they're sore at you. They
think you threw them down." He liked to air his American slang.
Edith cupped her chin in her hand and looked at him. There was no
mystery about the situation, no shyness in the eyes with which she
appraised him. She was beginning to like him too.
That night when she got back to Mabel's apartment her mood was
reckless. She went to the window and stood looking at the crooked
and chimney-potted skyline that was London.
"Oh, what's the use?" she said savagely, and gave up the fight.
When Mabel came home she told her.
"I'm going to get out," she said without preamble.
She caught the relief in Mabel's face, followed by a purely
conventional protest.
"Although," she hedged cautiously, "I don't know, dearie. People
look at things sensibly these days. You've got to live, haven't you?
They're mighty quick to jail a girl who tries to jump in the river
when she's desperate."
"I'll probably end there. And I don't much care."
Mabel gave her a good talking to about that. Her early training had
been in a church which regarded self-destruction as a cardinal sin.
Then business acumen asserted itself:
"He'll probably put you on somewhere. He's crazy about you, Ede."
But Edith was not listening. She was standing in front of her opened
trunk tearing into small pieces something that had been lying in the
tray.
VII
Now the boy had tried very hard to die, and failed. The thing that
had happened to him was an unbelievable thing. When he began to use
his tired faculties again, when the ward became not a shadow land
but a room, and the nurse not a presence but a woman, he tried
feebly to move his right arm.
But it was gone.
At first he refused to believe it. He could feel it lying there
beside him. It ached and throbbed. The fingers were cramped. But
when he looked it was not there.
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