“Went out alone! I can not understand it!” exclaimed John Temple; and then he once more entered the bedroom and looked around. Could she have left some letter, some message, he was thinking. But there was nothing; no sign that she had been there. After this he went back to the sitting-room, and here he found May’s cape lying on the floor. He had unfastened it when she had fainted, and flung it over the end of a couch. But her hat was gone! The poor girl, in her despair, had never remembered her cape, and as John Temple lifted it up a sudden fear, a sudden anguish, struck his soul.
“Had she left him?” he was asking himself, with white lips. “But surely not without some word, some line.”
He went up to the table; water was standing there, and some brandy which had been brought when May was ill, and the doctor’s prescription. And her handkerchief and gloves. She had forgotten these too, but there was no letter, nor penciled note. He looked everywhere, but it was in vain. In the short time that he had been away she had disappeared, and the greatest anxiety naturally filled John Temple’s heart.
Again he recalled the waiter who had seen her leave the hotel, but the man had nothing more to tell. Then he himself went out and wandered restlessly up and down the street, looking at every one he met in a miserable state of uncertainty and doubt. He thought once of returning to Miss Webster’s, but no; she had positively refused to go there, and besides she might return at any moment. He tried to buoy himself up with this hope, but hope grew well-nigh to despair when hour after hour passed and there was no news of May.
When the last post came in he again went out into the streets. He inquired at the nearest cab-stand, but no one seemed to remember anything of a lady such as he described. He shrank from applying to the police, and spent a night of terrible misery and remorse.
“I should not have left her,” he moaned aloud as he wandered up and down the sitting-room where he had seen her last. He refused to go to bed, and more than once went down to question the night porter. But the gray dawn stole over the city, and the noise and murmur of the day began, and still nothing was seen or heard of the unhappy woman who had disappeared.
The first post arrived and there was no letter for John Temple, and then he knew that May had forsaken him. He realized this with the bitterest pain. He recalled her words and looks before he had left her, and suddenly—like a dagger—a memory smote him. She had said as she lay in his arms, “We could not live apart.”
“Good God! did she go out to die then!” burst from John Temple’s pale, quivering lips. The anguish of this idea was almost too great to bear. He hesitated no longer about going to the police. He went—a white-faced, agitated man—to the nearest station and told his story. His wife had disappeared from the hotel, he said, and he was in a state of the utmost misery and anxiety about her.
The inspector took notes and made certain inquiries. “Had he had any quarrel with the lady? Was there any reason that she should leave him?”
“No quarrel,” answered John Temple, huskily, “but I told her some bad news.”