“What other?”
Her voice seemed to come from a long way off. Her lips were dry and cracked.
“The Annabel who lives here, who sings every night at the ‘Unusual’? They call her by your old name. Her hair and voice and figure are as yours used to be. Who is she, I say?”
“My sister!” Annabel faltered.
He trembled violently. He seemed to be labouring under some great excitement.
“I am a fool,” he said. “All these days I have taken her for you. I have pleaded with her—no wonder that I have pleaded with her in vain. And all this time perhaps you have been waiting, expecting to hear from me. Is it so, Annabel?”
“I did not know,” she faltered, “anything about you. Why should I?”
“At last,” he murmured, “at last I have found you. I must not let you go again. Do you know, Annabel, that you are my wife.”
“No,” she moaned, “not that. I thought—the papers said——”
“You thought that I was dead,” he interrupted. “You pushed the wheel from my hand. You jumped, and I think that you left me. Yet you knew that I was not dead. You came to see me in the hospital. You must have repented a little, or you would not have done that.”