At this point in Helen's statement Thornton Carey informed her for the first time of the steps that had been taken in order to procure Trenton Warren's attendance at New York, and his intervention in the efforts which they were making to obtain a clue to the perpetrators of the crime.
She had almost forgotten him, until the questions of the police-officers respecting the daily habits and associates of her husband had recalled him to her mind; the recollection arose even while she was speaking of him, with a dreary wonder that a few days ago a complication in her domestic history caused by him should have seemed so serious, and have been struck into absolute nullity by the undreaded calamity that had come to teach her how far facts might outweigh fancies in terror and in pain. While the men were speaking to her, asking her questions, to which she was giving almost mechanical answers, her mind was busy with that interview between herself and Trenton Warren, which now seemed hundreds of years old, and of infinite unimportance; and she had suffered it to worry her, she had thought about it and let it interfere with the frankness and brightness of her very last communications with the husband who was never to know a thought or word of hers more.
How she hated her folly, but doubly she hated the man who had inspired it! What did it matter now--what could it really have mattered then? Had she not allowed a chimera to take possession of her mind, to intervene between her and that full confidence, that full acquiescence, in every wish of Alston's that was due to him? Then Helen's good sense told her that she must not allow feelings of this kind to intrude just at present; that she was not in a fit state to disentangle the real from the imaginary, or to weigh with the scrupulous exactitude which it deserved the influence that that interview had had upon her recent life. Then she said simply, in reply to Thornton Carey's communication with regard to the telegram, 'I suppose he has arrived?'
'No, he has not,' said Carey; 'and that forms one of the difficulties in our way of proceeding just at present, besides constituting a very vexatious delay in the information, which we hoped to have completed by this time for transmission to Liverpool.'
'Where is he, then?'
'We don't know.'
'In what terms did he answer the telegram?'
'We have received no answer, and this puzzles us extremely.'
'Would you mind telling me,' asked Helen, 'in what words you put your message?'
Thornton Carey took out his pocketbook, and read a memorandum of the exact form of his despatch to Trenton Warren at Chicago.