Page:Glitter (1926).pdf/193

Jock had a distracted minute in which to visualize Eunice receiving the cut direct from women who had formerly accepted her as one of them. then he bent his mind acutely on her further revelations. She had conquered the weeping that threatened, and sat tearless and wan, fumbling with her handkerchief as she talked. Her fingernail, outlining its hem around and around and around made a sound that set his teeth on edge like the screech of chalk down a blackboard.

"You don't know," she said. "Nobody knows what I've been through. Things hit me mighty hahd, Jock—I'm sensitive, I'm not like you. I can't laugh it off the way you can. In the beginnin' I didn't undahstand what was goin' on and I decided I must be imaginin' it, or somethin', But then finally one of the girls—Fifi Dane, you know her—told me. She said she thought I ought to know that people were talkin' somethin' awful! All about you and I were in love with each othah, and used to see each othah on the quiet all the time, and about how suspicious and jealous Brad was. A lot of stuff about that. And then, how he caught us togethah that night, and how you ran away—she said people said you ran away, Jock, just imagine!—and how that: was the reason Brad—did what he did. 'Turned the gun that was meant for you on himself'—that was the way Fifi put it——"

"God!" A groan, wrung from Jock. He sprang up and began to stride the floor, pushing the fingers of one hand through his hair. At the opposite wall he wheeled and faced Eunice, with the hand lying quiescent at the nape of his neck. "Did you tell her?" he demanded. "Did you tell her the real reason why Brad 'turned the gun on himself'?"

"No, I—I didn't——"