CHAPTER XI

THE REMORSE OF WONDERING NANCY

She awoke to the sun, glad-hearted and made newly buoyant by one of those soundless black sleeping-nights that come only to the town-tired when they have first fled.  She ran to the glass to know if the restoration she felt might also be seen.  With unbiassed calculation the black-fringed lids drew apart and one hand pushed back of the temple, and held there, a tangled skein of hair that had thrown the dusk of a deep wood about her eyes.  Then, as she looked, came the little dreaming smile that unfitted critic eyes for their office; a smile that wakened to a laugh as she looked—­a little womanish chuckle of confident joy, as one alone speaking aloud in an overflowing moment.

An hour later she was greeting Bernal where the sun washed through the big room.

“Young life sings in me!” she said, and felt his lightening eyes upon her lips as she smiled.

There were three days of it—­days in which, however, she grew to fear those eyes, lest they fall upon her in judgment.  She now saw that his eyes had changed most.  They gave the face its look of absence, of dreaming awkwardness.  They had the depth of a hazy sky at times, then cleared to a coldly lucid glance that would see nothing ever to fear, within or without; that would hide no falseness nor yet be deceived by any—­a deadly half-shut, appraising coolness that would know false from true, even though they mated amicably and distractingly in one mind.

The effect of this glance which she found upon herself from time to time was to make Nancy suspect herself—­to question her motives and try her defenses.  To her amazement she found these latter weak under Bernal’s gaze, and there grew in her a tender remorse for the injustice she had done her husband.  From little pricking suspicions on the first day she came on the last to conviction.  It seemed that being with Bernal had opened her eyes to Allan’s worth.  She had narrowly, flippantly misjudged a good man—­good in all essentials.  She was contrite for her unwifely lack of abnegation.  She began to see herself and Allan with Bernal’s eyes:  she was less than she had thought—­he was more.  Bernal had proved these things to her all unconsciously.  Now her heart was flooded with gratitude for his simple, ready, heartfelt praise of his brother—­of his unfailing good-temper, his loyalty, his gifts, his modesty so often distressed by outspoken admiration of his personal graces.  She listened and applauded with a heart that renewed itself in all good resolves of devotion.  Even when Bernal talked of himself, he made her feel that she had been unjust to Allan.

Little by little she drew many things from him—­the story of his journeyings and of his still more intricate mental wanderings.  And it thrilled her to think he had come back with a message—­even though he already doubted himself.  Sometimes he would be jocular about it and again hot with a passion to express himself.