In a series of mournful pictures the progress of Marguerite to destruction flashed across his mind, one tragedy fading into the next. Youth, beauty, joyousness, sweetness, sensibility, fading, fading, fading until at last he saw the wretched, broken, half-insane woman fling herself headlong from the precipice, with a last despairing glance backward at all that her curse had stripped from her.
And the tears tore themselves from his eyes. The evil in her was blotted out. He could see only the Marguerite who had loved him, had saved him, who was even now flying because to her diseased mind it seemed best for her to go. “Poor girl!” he groaned. “Poor child that you are!”
Emily, on her way downtown the next morning in an “L” train, happened to glance at the newspaper which the man in the next seat was reading. It was the Herald, and she saw a two-column picture of Marguerite. She read the bold headlines: “Marguerite Feronia, ill. The Gold and Glory’s great dancer goes abroad, never to return to the stage or the country.”
She left the train at the next station, bought a Herald and read:
Among the passengers on the Fürst Bismarck yesterday was Marguerite Feronia, who for more years than it would be kind to enumerate has fascinated the gilded youth that throng the Gold and Glory nightly. Miss Feronia has been in failing health for more than a year. Again and again she has been compelled to disappoint her audiences. At last she realised that she was making a hopeless fight against illness and suddenly made up her mind to give up. She told no one of her plans until the last moment. In a letter from the steamship to the manager of the Gold and Glory she declared that she would never return and that she did not expect to live long.
The account was brief out of all proportion to the headlines, and to the local importance of the subject. Emily went at once to the newspaper files when she reached her office. In no other paper was there so much as in the Herald. She could find no clue to the mystery.
“At least he is free,” she thought. “And that is the important point. At least he is free—we are free.”
Although she repeated this again and again and tried to rouse herself to a sense of the joy it should convey, she continued in a state of groping depression.
Toward three o’clock came a telegram from Stilson—“Shall you be at home this evening? Most anxious to see you. Please answer, Democrat office.” She telegraphed for him to come, and her spirits began to rise. At last the dawn! At last the day! And her eyes were sparkling and she was so gay that her associates noted it, and “the old lady” confided to Mr. Burnham that she “had been wondering how much longer such a sweet, beautiful girl would have to wait before some man would have the sense to propose to her.” Nor was she less gay at heart when Stilson was shown into her little drawing-room, although she kept it out of her face—Marguerite’s departure might have been sad.