Thither Mrs. Leath went once or twice to visit him, and her
remaining days were packed with family obligations: getting,
as she phrased it, "frocks and governesses" for her little
girl, who had been left in France, and having to devote the
remaining hours to long shopping expeditions with her
mother-in-law. Nevertheless, during her brief escapes from
duty, Darrow had had time to feel her safe in the custody of
his devotion, set apart for some inevitable hour; and the
last evening, at the theatre, between the overshadowing
Marquise and the unsuspicious Owen, they had had an almost
decisive exchange of words.
Now, in the rattle of the wind about his ears, Darrow
continued to hear the mocking echo of her message:
"Unexpected obstacle." In such an existence as Mrs. Leath's,
at once so ordered and so exposed, he knew how small a
complication might assume the magnitude of an "obstacle;"
yet, even allowing as impartially as his state of mind
permitted for the fact that, with her mother-in-law always,
and her stepson intermittently, under her roof, her lot
involved a hundred small accommodations generally foreign to
the freedom of widowhood--even so, he could not but think
that the very ingenuity bred of such conditions might have
helped her to find a way out of them. No, her "reason",
whatever it was, could, in this case, be nothing but a
pretext; unless he leaned to the less flattering alternative
that any reason seemed good enough for postponing him!
Certainly, if her welcome had meant what he imagined, she
could not, for the second time within a few weeks, have
submitted so tamely to the disarrangement of their plans; a
disarrangement which--his official duties considered--might,
for all she knew, result in his not being able to go to her
for months.
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