There was something in her breathless, anxious voice that brought my heart up into my throat.
"Not leave you, but—"
"But the time of parting has come?" she said, with a rising inflection. "It has found us in a wild and desolate place,"—she smiled,—"more desolate and less wild than the place from which we sailed. You came to me strangely, sir; you go as strangely as you came."
"If I can be of any service to you," I blindly repeated, "I—"
Still smiling, she cut me short off. "I thank you, but I think I shall be able, after all, to make shift. If someone—Mr. Lamont, perhaps—will take me to some town where there is—an English church—"
She still was smiling, but her smile wavered.
Could she, I wondered with a sort of fierce eagerness, have told me all her story? Was there, then, really nothing hidden?
"If you—" I began, "if I—"
Then she covered her face with her hands and sobbed, and for the first time I dared guess the truth.
At what I then said,—the words that opened the gate to the life we two have lived together,—she smiled so brightly through her tears, that for the moment I forgot the dark shore, the stormy seas, and the terrible, tragic night through which we had passed.