Jane Cable, page 139 by George Barr McCutcheon
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me."
"Did she tell you not to admit me?" he asked, white-faced and calm.
"Yes, sir. NOBODY, sir."
He turned down the steps and walked away.
That afternoon he enlisted, and the following morning was going westward with a party of recruits, bound eventually for service with the Regulars in the Philippines.
CHAPTER XXI
IN THE PHILIPPINES
David Cable lost no time in hurrying away from Chicago with his wife and Jane. They were whisked westward in his private car on the second day after the Bansemer exposure. Broken-spirited, Jane acquiesced in all their plans; she seemed as one in a stupor, comprehending, yet unresponsive to the pain that enveloped her.
"I can't see anyone that I know here," she said listlessly. "Oh, the thought of what they are saying!"
They did not tell her that Graydon had enlisted as a private soldier in the United States Army; Jane only knew that she loved him and that the bar sinister existed.
Cable's devotion to her was beautiful. He could not have been more tender had she been his own daughter, instead of his wife's imposition.
Jane was ill in Pasadena for many weeks. Her depressed condition made her recovery doubtful. It was plain to two persons, at least, that she did not care whether she lived or died. The physicians were puzzled, but no explanation was offered by the Cables. It was not until certain Chicago sojourners generously spread the news, that the cause of her breakdown became apparent to the good doctors. Before many days, the girl who sat, wan and distrait, upon the flower-shaded piazza was an object of curiosity to fashionable Pasadena. As soon as she was strong enough to endure the trip, the hunted trio forsook Pasadena and fled northward.
San Francisco afforded relief in privacy. Jane's spirits began to revive. There had not been, nor was there ever to be, any mention of that terrible night and its revelations. What she may have felt and suffered in secret could only be conjectured by those