"He made a will just before he died," he said to Susan. "He
left everything to you."
Then she had not been mistaken. He had loved her, even as she
loved him. She turned and walked quickly from them. She
hastened into her cabin, closed the door and flung herself
across the bed. And for the first time she gave way. In that
storm her soul was like a little land bird in the clutch of a
sea hurricane. She did not understand herself. She still had
no sense that he was dead; yet had his dead body been lying
there in her arms she could not have been more shaken by
paroxysms of grief, without tears or sobs--grief that vents
itself in shrieks and peals of horrible laughter-like
screams--she smothered them in the pillows in which she buried
her face. Clelie came, opened the door, glanced in, closed
it. An hour passed--an hour and a half. Then Susan appeared
on deck--amber-white pallor, calm, beautiful, the fashionable
woman in traveling dress.
"I never before saw you with your lips not rouged!" exclaimed Clelie.
"You will never see them rouged again," said Susan.
"But it makes you look older."
"Not so old as I am," replied she.
And she busied herself about the details of the landing and
the customs, waving aside Garvey and his eager urgings that
she sit quietly and leave everything to him. In the carriage,
on the way to the hotel, she roused herself from her apparently
tranquil reverie and broke the strained silence by saying:
"How much shall I have?"
The question was merely the protruding end of a train of
thought years long and pursued all that time with scarcely an
interruption.
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