The relevance of her interruption did not come to me till nearly a year later.
“Frank dear, I must ask you, while I think of it, didn’t you know that your mother was very, very ill?”
All the blood in my body seemed to rush back to my heart and to stay there. We talked no more of Regina Barry, nor of anything but stark fundamental realities. In an instant they became as much the essentials of my life as if Regina Barry had never existed. Annette showed herself much better informed as to my career than she pretended to be, giving me to understand that the day on which I disappeared my mother had received a kind of death-blow. She was of the type to leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness to go after that which was lost; and in her inability to do so she had been seized, so Annette told me, with a mortal pining away. With her decline my father was declining also, and all because of me.
“I’ve been the most awful rotter, Annette,” I groaned, as I staggered to my feet. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Frank, I do know it. That’s why I’ve been so glad to get hold of you at last, and ask you to—to redeem yourself.”
“Redeem myself by going back?”
She looked up at me and nodded.
“Oh, but how can I?”