It was to a Morgan Wallifarro unaccustomedly pale and agitated that the same lady, who had pessimistically forecast Anne's future, gave him, on his arrival at home, what information she could.
"No one seems to have her address, Morgan," she said. "I suppose she wanted, for a while, to be in new surroundings. As for myself, I had a brief note sent back with a book I'd lent her. She said that she was going to New York—but that was all, and when I telephoned she had gone."
"But her affairs must be arranged for her. She has nothing," protested the man desperately. "In God's name what is she going to do? How did she suppose I was going to find her?"
The lady laid a hand on the young man's elbow, and tears came into her own eyes,
"She didn't confide in me, Morgan. What I think is only guess-work—but I don't believe she wanted you to find her."
CHAPTER XLIII
To Boone Wellver, Louisville had become a city lying without the zone of personal experience. Like a steamer which has altered its sailings, he made it no longer a port of call.
That mad hiatus of apostacy, in which he had been willing to throw down all the shrines of his acquired faith, had become to him an evil dream of the past—yet out of it something had remained. The fog which had bemused him then had left uncleared certain minors of realization. Just as he had not yet recognized that the Commonwealth's attorney had sent him away unsatisfied because he had come making his demands to the arrogant tune of insult, so he failed, too, to appreciate that Anne had held the silence, which, without her permission, he was resolved not to break, because he had violently rebuffed her.
He had refused to read the papers on the day set for her wedding, because he could not bear the torture of what he had expected to find there, and McCalloway had not spoken of the postponement because it fell within the boundaries of a topic upon which he had set a ban of silence, unless the younger man broached it. So with what would have seemed an impossible coincidence, it was weeks later that Boone ceased to flagellate himself with the thought of a honeymoon that had never begun. Even then he, unlike the more sophisticated of the circle to which he had once been admitted, accepted without question the reason given for the deferred marriage, and saw for himself no brightening of possibility.