"Is—it—true?" she asked in a hushed tone. The dull anguish of it lent a fierceness to his purpose.
"I have spoken to him. Would to God it were not!"
It did not seem strange to her that he should say so, nor that he did not come and stroke her hair as he so often did when she fancied herself in trouble. She crossed her arms on the top of the chair, and laid her cheek on them.
"I've always known that he must come back. Jack could never be dead," she murmured in a hopeless tone of voice; "he is overflowing with life, crude, arrogant life. Why did I believe them when they said he was dead?"
"Perhaps you wished to believe it," said the musician.
When he found the silence that followed no longer endurable, he moved a little nearer to her, where he could see the fierce movement of her shoulders and the curls on the back of her neck.
"Shall we resume our conversation?" he said, and touched the Baedeker.
"How can we? I must wait a little, see Jack, no, no, not see him, but—but write to him—if it is possible he never had my other letter? Why has he come back to torment me just when I was beginning to feel happy? And—oh, drop that book, can't you? Don't you understand that I cannot go abroad now?"
"Why not?"
"Because, oh, how dense you are! Even if I can get away from Jack, and I feel as if I never should be free again, but even supposing I can break his heart and leave him, how can I go away and be by myself interminably? You don't know me if you think that would do me any good."