She continued to point with her finger, her arm stretched out, her neck craned, her eyes full of a horror too great for words.
“There is no one here but ourselves,” said the prince, a vivid terror seizing on his heart with a viselike grip.
The others regarded her with consternation, but could not venture to obtrude themselves on her notice—the prince’s friend, and the girl Finette.
A deathly silence succeeded. The bride dropped her pointing finger, while retaining her clutch on her newly wedded husband’s arm, but she continued to gaze at the phantom conjured up by her disordered fancy.
“He is gone,” she whispered, with a great, gulping sigh. “Did you not see? He melted away into the shadows. Take me away before he returns.”
The prince hurried her to the door, then down the steps, and into his carriage. His friend placed the girl Finette in her mistress’ carriage and directed the coachman to take her as quickly as his horses would go to the Hotel Fleury, in the Rue de Richelieu, where the newly married couple were to sojourn in a magnificent suite of apartments for a couple of days previous to starting for Switzerland.
With a fear too deep for expression the prince watched his lovely idol as she lay trembling within his encircling arm. Her face was of a ghastly pallor, and her eyes were fixed with an absolutely vacant look on the opposite side of the carriage, but it was difficult to conjecture whether she was consciously thinking or not.
Those betraying words of hers: “They said he was dead—they pretended I had killed him—my husband—Gilardoni!” echoed in the brain of the prince like a beating pulse. Had she, then, committed some fearful crime, and had her reason given way under the sting of conscience?
But no—no, a thousand times no! It was impossible. With a love, a loyalty wasted on its object, he refused to believe anything ill of his beloved one.
“My own—my wife!” he murmured fondly.