The vernacular turn taken by Mrs. Diggs during this eager outburst gave it a spontaneity and naturalness that more than once brought the mist to Claire's eyes. She felt the true ring of friendly sympathy in every word that was spoken; the touches of slang pleased her; they were like the angularities of the lady's physical shape, severe and yet not ungraceful. She was sorry when her visitor rose to go, and had a sense of dreary loneliness after she had departed.
It would soon be the hour for dinner. But she could not dine. She knew that the decorous butler who waited on her would perceive her efforts to choke down the proffered food. Perhaps he would tingle with secret dread regarding his next wages. He read the newspapers, of course; everybody read them nowadays; and her husband's impending ruin had been their chief and hideous topic.
As the chill winter light in the room turned blue before it wholly died, she sat and thought of how many people would be glad to hear the very worst. They seemed to her a pitiless legion. Then, as she thought of how many would be sorry, three names rose uppermost in her mind: Mrs. Diggs, Thurston, and Stuart Goldwin. Yes, Goldwin surely would have no exultant feeling. He was full of arts and falsities, but he could not fail to regret any calamity that brought with it her own sharp discomfiture.
'He has lately been Herbert's rival in finance,' she told her own thoughts. 'Circumstance has in a manner pitted them against each other. Herbert rose so quickly. They have not been enemies, but they have stood on opposite sides in not a few matters of speculation. Still, I am sure he will lament the downfall, if it really comes. He will do so for my sake, if for no other reason. I should have questioned him more closely last night at the opera. I am sure he wanted me to speak with more freedom of the threatening disaster. I should have asked him'—
And then Claire's distressed ruminations were cut short by the quiet entrance of her husband. The door of the chamber had been ajar. Hollister simply pushed it a little further open, and crossed the threshold.
The dusk had begun, but it was still far from making his face in any way obscure to her. As she looked at it, while slowly rising from her chair, she saw that it had never, to her knowledge, been so wan and worn as now. He paused before her, and at once spoke.
"Have you heard?" he said.
She felt herself grow cold. "What?" she asked.
"I'm cleaned out. Everything has gone. I thought you might have seen the evening papers. They are full of it. Of course they don't know the real truth. Some of them say that I have five millions hidden away." He laughed here, and the laugh was bleak though low. "But I tell you the plain truth, Claire—there's nothing left. The truth is best; don't you think so?"
He was steadily watching her, as he thus spoke, and the detected irony of his words pierced her like a knife. A wistful distress was in the frank blue of his eyes; they seemed to reflect from her own spirit the wrong that she had done him.