“Good God! Catrina?”
“No, not Catrina.”
“Then who?” cried Paul hoarsely. His hands fell heavily on the table.
“Your wife!”
Paul knew before the words were spoken.
He turned again, and stood looking out of the window with his hands thrust into his pockets. He stood there for whole minutes in an awful stillness. The clock on the mantel-piece, a little travelling timepiece, ticked in a hurried way as if anxious to get on. Down beneath them, somewhere in the courtyards of the great castle, a dog—a deep-voiced wolf-hound—was baying persistently and nervously, listening for the echo of its own voice amid the pines of the desert forest.
Steinmetz watched Paul’s motionless back with a sort of fascination. He moved uneasily, as if to break a spell of silence almost unbearable in its intensity. He went to the table and sat down. From mere habit he took up a quill pen. He looked at the point of it and at the inkstand. But he had nothing to write. There was nothing to say.
He laid the pen aside, and sat leaning his broad head upon the palm of his hand, his two elbows on the table. Paul never moved. Steinmetz waited. His own life had been no great success. He had had much to bear, and he had borne it. He was wondering heavily whether any of it had been as bad as what Paul was bearing now while he looked out of the window with his hands in his pockets, saying nothing.
At length Paul moved. He turned, and, coming toward the table, laid his hand on Steinmetz’s broad shoulder.
“Are you sure of it?” he asked, in a voice that did not sound like his own at all—a hollow voice like that of an old man.