Annie did not sleep. After lying a long time awake she took some of the
tonic that Dr. Morrell had left her, upon the chance that it might quiet
her; but it did no good. She dressed herself, and sat by the window till
morning.
The breaking day showed her purposes grotesque and monstrous. The revulsion
that must come, came with a tide that swept before it all prepossessions,
all affections. It seemed as if the child, still asleep in her crib, had
heard what she said, and would help to hold her to her word.
She choked down a crust of bread with the coffee she drank at breakfast,
and instead of romping with Idella at her bath, she dressed the little one
silently, and sent her out to Mrs. Bolton. Then she sat down again in the
sort of daze in which she had spent the night, and as the day passed, her
revolt from what she had pledged herself to do mounted and mounted. It was
like the sort of woman she was, not to think of any withdrawal from her
pledges; they were all the more sacred with her because they had been
purely voluntary, insistent; the fact that they had been refused made them
the more obligatory.
She thought some one would come to break in upon the heavy monotony of the
time; she expected Ralph or Ellen, or at least Lyra; but she only saw Mrs.
Bolton, and heard her about her work. Sometimes the child stole back from
the kitchen or the barn, and peeped in upon her with a roguish expectance
which her gloomy stare defeated, and then it ran off again.
She lay down in the afternoon and tried to sleep; but her brain was
inexorably alert, and she lay making inventory of all the pleasant things
she was to leave for that ugly fate she had insisted on. A swarm of fancies
gave every detail of the parting dramatic intensity. Amidst the poignancy
of her regrets, her shame for her recreancy was sharper still.
By night she could bear it no longer. It was Dr. Morrell's custom to come
nearly every night; but she was afraid, because he had walked home with her
from the meeting the night before, he might not come now, and she sent for
him. It was in quality of medicine-man, as well as physician, that she
wished to see him; she meant to tell him all that had passed with Mr. Peck;
and this was perfectly easy in the interview she forecast; but at the sound
of his buggy wheels in the lane a thought came that seemed to forbid her
even to speak of Mr. Peck to him. For the first time it occurred to her
that the minister might have inferred a meaning from her eagerness and
persistence infinitely more preposterous than even the preposterous letter
of her words. A number of little proofs of the conjecture flashed upon her:
his anxiety to get away from her, his refusal to let her believe in her own
constancy of purpose, his moments of bewilderment and dismay. It needed
nothing but this to add the touch of intolerable absurdity to the horror
of the whole affair, and to snatch the last hope of help from her.