“Quite.”
He looked sorrowfully in my face, wrung my hand a second time and walked off rapidly.
It was the expression of his I ever after remembered with most pathetic heart-sickness and love. I never saw it in his eyes again—never again.
I rose upon the Sunday morning restless still and unrefreshed. An undefinable feeling of ominous expectancy would not let me sit quiet or read or do anything but lend my mind to extravagant speculations and pace the room up and down in nervous irritability.
At last, thoroughly tired out, I threw myself into an easy-chair and dozed off from sheer exhaustion. I could not have slept many minutes, when a clap in my ears awoke me. It might have been an explosive burst of thunder, so loudly it slammed upon my senses. Yet it was nothing more than the closing of the room door.
Then I struggled to my feet, for Duke stood before me, and I saw that his face was white and menacing as death’s own.
“Get up!” he cried, in a harsh, stern voice. “I want to ask you something.”
I faced him and my heart seemed to suddenly swerve down with a sickly sensation.
“What is it?” I muttered.
“She’s gone—that’s all!”