LIFE FROM DEATH.
Hermia was in bed one morning when her maid brought her the papers. She
opened one, then sat suddenly erect, and the paper shook in her hands.
She read the headlines through twice—details were needless. Then she
dropped the paper and fell back on the pillows. A train had gone over an
embankment in the South, and Ogden Cryder’s name was in the list of
dead.
She lay staring at the painted canopy of her bed. It seemed to her that
with Cryder’s life her past was annihilated, that the man took with him
every act and deed of which she had been a part. A curtain seemed to
roll down just behind her. A drama had been enacted, but it was over.
What had it been about? She had forgotten. She could recall nothing.
That curtain shut out every memory.
She pressed her hands over her eyes. She was free! She could take up her
life from this hour and forget that any man had entered it but Grettan
Quintard. Cryder? Who was he? Had he ever lived? What did he look like?
She could not remember. She could recall but one face—a face which
should never be seen in this room.
Though her mood was not a hard one, she felt no pity for Cryder. Love
had made every object in life insignificant but herself and her lover.
She would marry Quintard. She would be all that in her better moments
she had dreamed of being—that and more. She had great capacity for good
in her; her respect and admiration for Quintard’s higher qualities had
taught her that. She threw up her arms and struck her open palms against
the bed’s head. And how she loved him! What exultation in the thought of
her power to give him happiness!
For a few days Quintard felt as if he were walking on the edge of a
crater. The hardness in her nature seemed to have melted and gone. The
defiant, almost cynical look had left her eyes; they were dreamy, almost
appealing. She made no further effort to tempt him, but he had a weird
feeling that if he touched her he would receive an electric shock. He
did not suspect the cause of the sudden change, nor did he care to know.
It was enough that it was.
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