At last, in a dull heavy way, the words came, each sounding as if the speaker were in despair, but willing to suffer so that her companion might be spared, and by degrees Louise learned that Van Heldre still lay in the same insensible state, the awaking from which Madelaine shrank from with horror, lest it should mean the return for a brief time of sense before the great final change.
“I could not come to you,” said Louise, after a long silence, as she gazed wistfully in her friend’s face, “and thought we should never meet again as friends.”
“You should have known me better,” replied Madelaine. “It is very terrible, such a—such a—oh Louy, dearest, there must have been some mistake. Harry—Harry could not have been so base.”
Louise was silent for a time. At last she spoke.
“There must be times,” she said gently, “when even the best of us are not answerable for our actions. He must have been mad. It was when, too—he had—promised—he had told me—that in the future—oh,” she cried, shuddering, as she covered her face with her hands, “it can’t be true—it cannot be true.”
Again there was a long silence in the room, whose drawn-down blind turned the light of a sickly yellow hue. But the window was open, and from time to time the soft sea breeze wafted the blind inward, and a bright ray of sunny light streamed in like hope across the two bent forms.
“I must not stay long,” said Madelaine. “I shiver whenever I am away, lest—”
“No, no,” cried Louise, passionately, as she strained her friend to her breast, “we will not despond yet. All this comes across our lives like a dense black cloud, and there must be a great change in the future. Your father will recover.”
“I pray that he may,” said Madelaine.
“And I will not believe that Harry is—dead.”