His eyes opened. He seemed, in that last fading instant, to see only her. "Duchess!" he whispered, and with the word the light died in his face. "Duchess!"
Mrs. Allen looked at the Judge's quivering countenance with dull blank eyes, that saw two great tears suddenly detach themselves and roll down his pale cheeks. He took a step toward her.
"Charlotte—" he stammered. "Charlotte!"
There was in the shaking voice something that pierced her agony, a tone that she had not heard on his lips for many, many long years—an echo of accents that she had known when she was a bride. She gazed at him an instant voicelessly.
Then all at once her face broke up and a wild cry tore itself upward from her heart. It was not the voice now of cold and placid scorn, but that of the real woman—the eternal voice of Rachel weeping for her children. The sword of overwhelming tragedy had stripped off the protecting cicatrice of pride and arrogant resentment and bared the lonely soul beneath, that in this shuddering instant groped wildly for human comfort.
The Judge bent down and clasped her, and there, above the body of Chilly, for the first time since the son who lay dead before them had been born, she lay in her husband's arms, her face turned against his breast.
CHAPTER XLI
DARK DAYS
"If I only knew!" That was Echo's mental cry in the long days that followed Chilly's burial. "If I only knew whether Harry cared for me any longer!" Sharp as was her grief for her brother, this pang was the sharper, and it did not dull with time.