“Marie Beaujeu died last night—”
“Marie—”
“Died last night. She had been skating in the afternoon, and she came home chilled and wandering in her mind, as if the frost had got in it somehow. She grew worse and worse, and all the time she talked of you.”
“Of me?”
“We wondered what it meant. No one knew you were lovers.”
“I didn't know it myself; more's the pity. At least, I didn't know—”
“She said you were on the ice, and that you didn't know about the big breaking-up, and she cried to us that the wind was off shore and the rift widening. She cried over and over again that you could come in by the old French creek if you only knew—”
“I came in that way.”
“But how did you come to do that? It's out of the path. We thought perhaps—”
But Hagadorn broke in with his story and told him all as it had come to pass.