Well, After All--

by Frank Frankfort Moore

She was benumbed with astonishment; and what caused her most astonishment was her own selfpossession during the interview which she had just had with Claude Westwood. She marvelled how it was that she had sat in that chair quietly listening to him, while he boasted of his constancy—of his having remembered her name.

He could not understand what she meant when she said that the fact of his remembering her name was a proof that he had forgotten her. Surely he should have understood that she meant that he could not make such a reference to her as he had made in his postscript, unless he had forgotten what her nature was.

And yet, that one phrase which had been forced from her, was the solitary expression of the terrible thought that overwhelmed her—the thought that her life was laid in ashes. The reflection upon this marvellous calmness of hers amazed her.

She had heard of women finding themselves face to face with their perfidious lovers, and denouncing them in tragic tones. Was it possible that she was differently constituted from other women? Was ever woman so faithful to a man as she had been? And was not the unfaithfulness of the man in proportion to the fidelity of the woman? And yet she had been content to utter only that one sentence of reproach, and its meaning had been so obscure that he had failed to appreciate it!

The worst of it was that she felt in her heart no bitterness against him. She had no burning wish to reproach him for having made a ruin of her life. She had no fervid desire to be revenged upon him. She wondered if she was different from other women to whom revenge was dear. Had all the spirit—that womanly element which women call spirit—been crushed out of her by that antagonistic element known as constancy? Had her faith in that man made her faithless to her womanhood?

She failed to find an answer to any of these questions; and she went about her daily duties as she had always done, only with that feeling of numbness upon her heart.

But when night came, and her maid had left her with her freshly-brushed hair falling over her shoulders, she bent her head forward between the candles that were lighted on each side of her toilet glass. She turned over the masses of her hair, and saw the grey lines here and there among them. Then, and only then, her tears began to fall. They came silently, but irresistibly—not in a torrent of passion, but slowly, blinding her eyes, and causing all those pictures of the past which now came crowding before her, to be blurred.

It was a tear-blurred picture that she now saw of Claude Westwood as he had appeared before her eyes on the eve of his departure for Africa—that picture which she had cherished in her heart of hearts through the dreary years. She now failed to see in it any of the features of the man who had been with her that day speaking those wild words about the act of mercy which had been done in regard to the poor wretch who had been found guilty of the murder of Richard Westwood. She had noticed how his eyes had glared with the lust of blood in their depths, as he asked why the wretch had not been either hanged or set free—set free, so that he, Claude, might have a chance of killing him.

She shuddered, and covered her face with her hands, as if she were trying to shut out this new picture that came to take the place of the old. Was it her doom, she asked herself, to live for the rest of her days with this new picture ever before her eyes—this picture of the haggard, sun-scorched man, who had come back to civilisation with those deep eyes of his full of the blood-lust of the savage?

She picked up his portrait, which he had given her long ago, and which had been her sweetest consolation ever since. She had looked upon it and had kissed it the previous night—every night since he and she had parted. She looked at it now for a few moments.... With a cry she flung it on the floor and trampled upon it; she set her heel upon it, and ground the glass of the frame into the painted ivory.