Page:Sanctuary (Wharton 1903).djvu/130

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

SANCTUARY

not once before seen the same thought moving behind the same eyes? She was sure it had occurred to Dick to use Darrow's drawings. As she lay awake in the darkness she could hear him, long after midnight, pacing the floor overhead: she held her breath, listening to the recurring beat of his foot, which seemed that of an imprisoned spirit revolving wearily in the cage of the same thought. She felt in every fibre that a crisis in her son's life had been reached, that the act now before him would have a determining effect on his whole future. The circumstances of her past had raised to clairvoyance her natural insight into human motive, had made of her a moral barometer responding to the faintest fluctuations of atmosphere, and years of anxious meditation had familiarized her with the form which her son s temptations were likely to take. The peculiar misery of her situation was that she could not, except

[ 122 ]