When at last she had found it necessary to dismiss the best cook she ever
had, because of him, they saw little of each other. This was coincident
with his failure at the ash-factory, where he mismanaged and even robbed
Jean Jacques right and left; and she had firmly insisted on Jean Jacques
evicting him, on the ground that it was not Sebastian Dolores' bent to
manage a business.
This little episode, as they drove home from Vilray, had an unreasonable
effect upon her.
It was like the touch of a finger which launches a boat balancing in the
ways onto the deep. It tossed her on a sea of agitation. She was swept
away on a flood of morbid reflection.
Her husband and her daughter, laughing and talking in the front seat of
the red wagon, seemed quite oblivious of her, and if ever there was a
time when their influence was needed it was now. George Masson was coming
over late this afternoon to inspect the work he had been doing; and she
was trembling with an agitation which, however, did not show upon the
surface. She had not seen him for two days--since the day after the Clerk
of the Court had discovered her in the arms of a man who was not her
husband; but he was coming this evening, and he was coming to-morrow for
the last time; for the repair work on the flume of the dam would all be
finished then.
But would the work he had been doing all be finished then? As she thought
of that incident of three days ago and of its repetition on the following
day, she remembered what he had said to her as she snatched herself
almost violently from his arms, in a sudden access of remorse.
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