“But now we must make up for it,” he said. “We must never lose each other again. I love you, Monimé. I believe I have always loved you, somewhere at the back of my mind.”
She smiled the wise smile of the old gods. “It was four years ago,” she said, “and our little dream was so short. In a way we are strangers to one another.”
Presently she rose, and told him that he must go. “The hotel keeps early hours,” she said.
She led him to the door of the garden, but to his fervent adieux she gave no great response. The expression on her face was placid once more, and his excited senses could make nothing of it.
He walked down the silent, mediæval street oblivious to his surroundings. Behind a shuttered window there were sounds of the rhythmic beating of a tambourine and the twanging of some sort of stringed instrument; but he heeded them not. A cloaked and hooded figure, leaning upon a staff, passed him, and bade him “Good-night” in Arabic; but he did not respond. He entered the hotel, and walked up the steps to his bedroom without any real consciousness of his actions.
His whole being was, as it were, in an uproar, and his emotions were playing riot with his reason. He had chanced again upon the woman he had loved and almost forgotten, the woman he ought to have married; and suddenly the great miracle had been wrought within him, and he was deeply, wildly, madly in love with her. She was the mother of his son—his son, his son, his son!
Over and over again, he repeated it to himself, and the words seemed to go roaring like a tempest through the crowded halls of his thoughts. But presently, as he sat upon the foot of his bed, new whirlwinds of actuality came to the assault, and scattered the shouting multitude of his dreams.
If he married Monimé he would be a bigamist, and within the reach of the law. If he told her that he was married he might lose her for ever. Even if he kept his real identity a secret, and risked detection, the fact remained that he had thrown away his home and his fortune, and had nothing in prospect when his present means were exhausted.
For the first time since the early days of his inheritance he realized the value of the property to which he had succeeded, he realized the merit of the name he had abandoned. In later years how could he ever look his son in the face, and tell him of the home and income that had been thrown away? Yet if he kept his secret, how could he endure to live daily to Monimé a fundamental lie?
Bitterly he reproached himself for his past actions. Bitterly he cursed Dolly for her part in the dilemma. There seemed no way out of the mess; and far into the night he sat with his head resting upon his hands, his fingers deep in his hair.