I presented myself after dinner. She was dressed in black, and her
manner was nervous, flurried, ill at ease. We shook hands very
formally, and then could find nothing to say to each other. Had she,
with a woman's instinct, guessed, from that instant's view of the
thing in the chair last night, all that was involved for me in our
love? If not all, she had guessed most of it. She had guessed that the
powerful spirit of Lord Clarenceux was inimical, fatally inimical, to
me. None knew better than herself the terrible strength of his
jealousy. I wondered what were her thoughts, her secret desires.
At length she began to speak of commonplace matters.
"Guess who has called," she said, with a little smile.
"I give it up," I said, with a smile as artificial as her own.
"Mrs. Sullivan Smith. She and Sullivan Smith are on their way home
from Bayreuth; they are at the Hôtel du Rhin. She wanted to know all
about what happened in the Rue Thiers, and to save trouble I told
her. She stayed a long time. There have been a lot of callers. I am
very tired. I--I expected you earlier. But you are not listening."
I was not. I was debating whether or not to show her Alresca's letter.
I decided to do so, and I handed it to her there and then.
"Read that," I murmured.
She read it in silence, and then looked at me. Her tender eyes were
filled with tears. I cast away all my resolutions of prudence, of
wariness, before that gaze. Seizing her in my arms, I kissed her again
and again.
"I have always suspected--what--what Alresca says," she murmured.
"But you love me?" I cried passionately.
"Do you need to be told, my poor Carl?" she replied, with the most
exquisite melancholy.
"Then I'll defy hell itself!" I said.
She hung passive in my embrace.