The band was playing it, villainously enough, but the distance smoothed away the defects.
It broke Jane down. She leaned against his shoulder and sobbed like a child, and then, with both hands upstretched, she drew his face down to hers and murmured—no matter what.
Then all at once—heedless of ruin, forgetting all things, carried away on the dumb tide of passion, the wave that had retreated before disaster, only to come shoreward again resistless and gigantic—all at once, and without a word, he took her in his arms.
It was the eloquence of passion and despair, the speech without tongue of a soul tormented and in extremis.
It broke Jane down utterly. Hopeless, haggard, and pale as a person in the midst of some terrible disaster, she clung to him, whispering in his ear words repeated over and over again, with that reiteration which forms the rhetoric of the dying and the lost.
She had cast everything aside, the world, her position in society, her husband, her wealth. Passion and pity, that strange combination, had for the moment blinded her eyes to everything but the man beside her—but did she love him? Fate had not yet disclosed the answer to that old fatal question, that sphinx-like question whose answer forms the plot of each man’s story.
CHAPTER XXX
THE FALSE REPORT