In an ordinary way Anstice would have deemed it his duty to scoff at such superstition; but to-night, his nerves unstrung, by the happenings of the last few days, his bodily vigour at a low ebb, his mind a chaos of miserable, hopeless memories and fears, Chloe's words woke a quite unexpected response in his soul.
"Don't say that, Mrs. Carstairs!" He spoke sharply. "Don't let us talk of bad luck--to-night of all nights!"
In the moonlight her narrow blue eyes studied his face with sudden keenness, and she felt an unusual desire to bring comfort to the soul which she felt with instinctive certainty stood in need of some help.
As a rule Chloe Carstairs, like Anstice himself, was too much preoccupied with the thought of her own private grudge against fate to have any sympathy to spare for others who might have known that Deity's frown; but to-night, owing possibly to some softening of her mental fibres induced by the sight of her child's suffering, she felt oddly pitiful towards this man, and her inward emotion found vent in words which surprised her as much as they startled the man to whom they were addressed.
"Why to-night, Dr. Anstice? Has this day been to you what it has been to me--a day of the bitterest suffering I have ever known?"
The tone of her deep voice, so oddly gentle, the compassionate expression in her usually cold blue eyes, were too much for Anstice, whose endurance was nearly at the breaking point; and he turned to her with a look in his face which dismayed her, so tragic was it.
"Mrs. Carstairs, this day I have been in--hell!" The word sounded cruelly out of place in the quiet moonlit night. "Once before I fancied I had reached the point at which a man may turn his back on life and its horrors without thinking himself a pitiful coward. I suffered then--my God, how I suffered!--but the torture I have endured to-day makes me feel as though I have never known what suffering is until now."
Her answer came quickly.
"But you know now that no man can turn his back on life and yet escape the allegation of cowardice!" It was an assertion rather than a question. "Dr. Anstice, I don't ask to know what your suffering has been--I don't want you to tell me--but one thing I do know, that you, and men like you, are not the ones who give up the battle when the fight is fiercest."
He delayed his answer so long that Chloe had time to feel curiously frightened by his silence. And when his reply came it was hardly reassuring.