The room was too large to be called a cell, and if sparsely furnished, was not uncomfortable. Philip noted an easy-chair and a rug spread beneath the table, while on the table were writing materials and books, and a vase of delicate-hued roses; the counterpart of those he had seen in Esther's boudoir the night before. It touched him strangely to see this proof of Esther's love and Esther's faith; the golden blossoms came, he knew, from the rose-houses at the Folly, and spoke eloquently of Mrs. Newbold's belief in Patricia's innocence, since their presence in that prison-room—fraught as they were with so many memories—must, if she were guilty, prove a scourge rather than a comfort.
It took Philip some moments to realise his position and to adjust his faculties; when at last he roused himself and looked across the dimly-lighted room, it was to meet Patricia's eyes fixed upon him with an expression of proud endurance, that was more pathetic than tears.
She had seated herself at the table and was leaning forward, her hands folded across the portfolio that lay open before her. She was dressed in black, and the severe lines and folds of the yielding cashmere seemed to mark with painful accuracy the increased slenderness of her form—a slenderness, it struck Philip, that had almost reached attenuation. Her face was very pale; only the vivid burning scarlet of her lips, and the blue fire of her eyes beneath the straight dark brows, redeemed it from absolute pallor.
The confinement, added to the tropical heat without, and the close atmosphere within, had told visibly upon her freshness and vigour; there was a lassitude about her attitude and a weariness in the lines of her face that bespoke mental as well as physical exhaustion, and now that the sudden flush, called up at sight of him, had died out of her cheeks, Philip perceived how hollow they had grown, and how the circles under her eyes had darkened. Her hands as they rested on the open portfolio were stripped of all their wonted brave array of rings, and looked as white as the paper beneath them, the blue veins painfully apparent.
It was thus that he saw her again; it was thus that they met after that parting on the night of the theatricals when she, radiant, beautiful, sparkling with jewels, triumphant and successful, had laughed aside his love, and swept by him with a light jest and indifferent word, that wounded deeper than she might ever know. He had gone from her then, smarting under his humiliation, and in the hour of his pain proffered the love she had rejected to another woman, who could scarcely be called her rival, and yet who influenced him as potentially as she.
And what the result had been of that second wooing he dared not now remember, for even as he recalled his bondage to Adèle Lamien, and as he looked upon the wrecked beauty, the stained loveliness of the woman before him, so, too, he realised that he loved her and her only, loved her better in this her hour of disgrace and misery than ever before; and that never in reality had his true allegiance swerved from this one woman of his heart—Patricia Hildreth.
The silence between them grew oppressive, embarrassing; it was she who first broke through it, saying, in a voice that trembled somewhat, and with a little laugh that was but a pitiful mockery of its old gaiety, and that ended in a half sob:
"So you have come at last to see me, Philip. Well, and is it not absurd that you should seek and find me—here?" She emphasized her words by a swift glance up at the grated window and around the bare un-homelike room.
At her voice Philip awoke as it were to life, his eyes followed hers in that momentary, but comprehensive glance, and he understood only too well the meaning of the quickly-repressed sigh, that half escaped her, as she caught the gleam of yellow light upon the roses in the tall vase.
He crossed the room quickly, and standing beside her, rested his hand near hers, bending over her and speaking rapidly, in a voice whose deep emotion was only kept in check by his strong will.