It was a moment of despairing dejection, coming naturally enough to one who had striven on and on, and all in vain, against the curse of a past in which he himself had not been to blame, except in so far as he had held himself aloof from the duties of it. Now the fatal inheritance was his alone, and the weight of it almost crushed him to the earth.
The accusing words against his father, which had escaped his lips, had been silenced in the self-same moment by the terrible suggestions he had listened to respecting the manner of that father's death. Yet to his predecessor was it solely due that he, the son, was now driven to the last terrible necessity, that, with ruin staring him in the face, deserted by his wife, forsaken by all his former friends, he was forced to resort to the only means which might yet save himself and all that he could still call his own from an enmity sown and nourished for many a long year, and whose fruits he was now compelled to taste. Arthur closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the arm-chair. He was worn out.
Eugénie had noiselessly left her hiding-place and had stepped on to the threshold. Forgotten now the peril she had passed through, forgotten the accusations she had heard with such feelings of horror, forgotten even the man on whom they rested and all that had reference to him.
Now that she was so near her husband, she saw and thought of nothing but him. The veil, which had so long divided them, would now be torn away. All would be made clear, and yet she hesitated and trembled at the coming decision as though sentence of death were about to be passed on her.
If she had been mistaken, if she were not received as she had hoped to be, as, after the sacrifice she had wrung from her pride, she felt she must be received .... The blood rushed violently to the young wife's heart, and it throbbed in an agony of suspense. Everything for her hung on the next minute.
"Arthur!" she said very softly.
He started up, as though he had heard a voice from the dead, and looked around him. There in the doorway, close to the spot where she had bade him farewell for ever, stood his wife.
In that first moment of recognition all consideration and reflection vanished; he rushed towards her and the cry of joy which was wrung from his lips, the radiant brightness of his eyes, revealed all that up to this hour had been disavowed by the self-restraint of months.
"Eugénie!"
She breathed freely, as though a mountain load had been lifted from her heart. The look, the tone with which he spoke her name gave her at last the long questioned certainty, and even though he stopped short in his hasty advance towards her, trying, as a protection against himself, it seemed, to take up the old mask once more and veiling that tell-tale glance, it was too late, she had seen too much!