Over and over she said to herself: "He's gone ... Hugo's gone ... He has thrown me over ..."
Gone was the prince of lovers. Calamity fell upon calamity. It would be better to be dead. And suddenly all that was hard and resisting in the girl broke with the taut strain, broke with a poignant bodily throe, and she fell face downward into a great chair, weeping with wild abandon.
Here, within two minutes from the shutting of the door, her mother found her.
So the beginning at the Beach touched its farther end. It touched with the shocks of cataclysm, whose echoes did not soon cease to reverberate. The word of the Lord came to Jack Dalhousie's father, and he would not suffer in silence. Mr. Heth arrived at the House at ten o'clock that night; it was the best he had been able to do, but it was too late for a family reunion by an hour. The two women had fled away to New York, probably on the very same train that bore back Hugo Canning. And behind them Rumor of the triple head had already risen, roaring an astonishment and a proverb.
XXII
One summer in the Old Hotel; of the World's wagging on, Kern Garland, and Prince Serge Suits; of how Kern leaves the Works for Good and has a Dream about Mr. V.V.'s Beautiful Lady; of how Mr. V.V. came to sit in the still Watches and think again of John the Baptist.
And still the world wagged on.
Calamity befell one House out of many, and the natural cycles did not stir a hair's breadth. The evening and the morning were another day, and another and another. May ran indifferent out, with blue skies and a maddening sequence of "Continued Heat." Then presently the long days had reached their length, loitered awhile, turned slowly backward. And June had become July, and midsummer lay fast over the half-empty town.