“He won’t,” she answered positively. “He can’t... He’s ill.”
This information moved Dare to a show of surprise. For a moment he was inclined to discredit the announcement; but the girl’s manner gave no indication that she was attempting to impose on him, and he accepted the statement as true. It was just possible that his illness accounted for Arnott’s silence.
“I left him at Pretoria,” she said, starting to walk again. “He is in a nursing home.” She furnished the address. “They won’t let you see him, if you go there,” she added abruptly.
He made a note of the address on the back of an envelope, and scrutinised her with puzzled uncertainty as he returned the envelope to his pocket.
“What’s the matter with him?” he asked.
“Paralysis.” She spoke curtly, with a kind of hard anger in her voice. “He will get better, but he will never be quite well. It will be a case for nursing—always.”
He observed a rush of tears to her eyes, but there was no softening in her manner as she went on in dull, resentful tones:
“Everything that happens to me ends like that. If it hadn’t been for this we were to have been married.”
“Married!” he repeated, amazed. “You! ... But—”
“Oh! don’t pretend,” she interrupted impatiently, “that you don’t know they aren’t properly married... His wife is dead. I made him show me proofs of that when he asked me to marry him... He thinks I am going to marry him still.”