The white face turned toward her pitifully.
"I don't know," the girl answered, her voice fluttering almost as weakly as Denis' had done. "I don't know—somewhere, though. To Paris again—or to Downport," with a faint shudder. And then, all at once she flung up her arms wildly, and dropped upon them, face downward.
"Oh, Pam," she cried out, "take me back to Downport, and let me die. I have no right here, and I had better go away. Oh, why did I ever come? Why did I ever come?"
She was sobbing in a hysterical, strained way, that was fairly terrible. Pamela bent over her, and touched her disordered hair with a singularly light touch. The tears welled up into her faded eyes. Just at the moment she could think of nothing but the day, so far away now, when her own heart had been torn up by the roots by one fierce grasp of the hand of relentless fate—the day when Arthur had died.
"Hush, Theo," she said to her, "don't cry, child."
But the feverish, excited sobs only came the faster, and more wildly.
"Why did I ever come?" Theo gasped. "It would have been better to have lived and died in Downport—far better, I can tell you now, Pam, now that it is all over. I loved him, and he loved me, too; he loved me always from the first, though we both tried so hard, so hard; yes, we did, Pamela, to help it. And now it is all ended, and I must never see him again. I must live and die, grow old—old, and never see him again."
There was no comfort for her. Her burst of grief and despair wore itself away into a strained quiet, and she lay at length in silence, Pamela at her side. But she was suffering fearfully in her intense girlish way.
She did not say much more to Pamela, but she had made up her mind, before many hours had passed, to return to Paris. She even got up in the middle of the night, in her feverish hurry to make her slight preparations for the journey. She could go to Paris and wait till Lady Throckmorton came back, if she had not got back already, and then she could do as she was told as to the rest. She would either stay there or go to Downport with Pamela.
Fortune, however, interposed. A carriage made its appearance, in the morning, with a new arrival—an arrival no less than Lady Throckmorton herself, bearing down upon them in actual excitement.