"Ill!" she cried, in a hard, thin voice; and a baffled life seemed to ebb away with that one little cry. Through the half-lights the woman did not move.
"For six weeks the poor fellow lay ill with malignant diphtheria, in a habitant's cottage, below Quebec," Repellier went on, more compassionately. "His strength did not come back to him, so they advised him to take the sea voyage, on a freighter, round to New York. They had a rough time of it, and they landed him here a little worse than when he crawled aboard."
"And then?"
"He's been strengthening up in a Brooklyn hospital—only last week he sent for me. I might as well tell you, Miss Vaughan, that he wrote to you three times, from Canada, and that only yesterday, on his way to his rooms to pack up his things, he picked up a copy of The Unwise Virgins!"
"And then—then you told him everything?" she whispered, tensely.
The old artist went over to her, and placed a hand gently on her arm.
"I told him only what I had to; the rest, I fear, he guessed." She drew back from him quickly.
"It was better for you both, I know now," he said, with his hand still touching her rigid arm. "And some day I think you will both forgive me for it!"
She turned from him where he stood, and groped her way blindly down the long stairs, her brain reeling with the mockery of it all, while her heart still cried blindly out for the man who had crowned her with his love, as she frantically told herself that she must still find him, and that in some devious way it might not yet be too late.