He stopped abruptly, for he recognized a figure standing by it, blue-coated, bareheaded, his long hair streaming in the wind. It was Shelley. His hand was outstretched, and with a quick movement Gordon strode forward and took it. A swift glance passed between the troubled, hollow eyes under the graying hair, and the clear, wild blue ones. Shelley’s held no reproach, only comprehension.
“Fletcher told me where to find you,” he said; “you must forgive him.”
“Where is the child?”
“In the convent of Bagnacavallo, near Ravenna.”
“And—Jane?”
“She is with us now in Pisa.”
A question he could not ask hung on Gordon’s lips as the other added:
“She is going to America with a troupe of players.”
She no longer wished the child, then! Allegra might be his. His, to care for, to teach to love him, to come in time to fill a part, maybe, of that void in his heart which had ached so constantly for Ada, further from him now than any distance measurable by leagues!
He looked again at the scrap of paper still in his hand, heedless of the wind that tore at his robe and lashed him with spume plucked from the tunnelled waves like spilt milk from a pan. Why had it come at just that moment to stay his leap into the hereafter? Was there, after all, deeper than its apparent fatalism, an obscure purpose in what man calls chance? Was this daughter, born out of the pale as he himself was beyond the pale, to give him the comfort all else conspired to deny? A slender hope grew tendril-like in him.