"Somehow I'd rather see you fly into a rage and call me all the evil names you could invent than look at me so lovingly and sadly; I would indeed. I should feel more that I had deserved to lose you; it would hurt less. But I know you love me; that is one reason why I have determined on trying this Mediterranean trip. Do you know, before I sat down to write to you yesterday, I made a balance of my hands. Held the pen in one and a razor in the other——"
"Dick! Dick! Oh, for God's sake don't talk so!"
"You would never have known, Mab. I am staying here in the name of Rigby. You don't read the police intelligence in the papers. If you had, you would never have linked an account of a drunkard's suicide in a Lambeth hotel with me. You would have thought me on blue water, keeping my promise to you."
The man at the door could hear the sounds of her grief still. It was agony to him; he ground his teeth. That she should suffer so, and he so close, so helpless to help her!
"The pen won the day, Queenie." The speaker was trying to infuse a note of cheeriness. "Don't cry, old girl; there is nothing to cry about after all. I'm here right enough. I wrote you to come up; to say good-bye to the man who has wronged you so. If I live through the trip I shall come back a better, sounder, healthier man. With the courage to fight this drink devil for life or death, for all I am worth."
"And, please God, conquer him, Dick!"
"And what about yourself, little woman? Have you been ill? You look worn out, worn and thinner. You haven't been worrying about me?"
"No, Dick; about Grace. She has been ill; dying once, I thought, but thank God she is as well to-day as ever she was."
"Our little Gracie has been as ill as all that? Poor little soul! And I've been drinking from morning till night, selfish brute that I am, without any thought for you or her. Good God! Why was I born—answer me that?"
The listening man had started back, horrified at the speaker's use of the word, Our. So stupefied was he that he hardly heard the latter part of the man's speech. So, then, this drink-sodden being, posturing under the name of Rigby, was the father of Gracie! Of the little girl he had helped to nurse back to life.