“God!” The exclamation came from George. “And the funeral!”
Storm sat as if turned to stone. It had been for him! Her secret trip to town, her innocent, pitiful subterfuges, her joy over the letter which had told her that the surprise she had planned was within her grasp! All for him!
Then a swift revulsion of feeling came. Bah! It may have been to throw more dust in his eyes, to render his confidence in her doubly assured; a sop to her own conscience, perhaps. The infinite reproach in her eyes when he had accused her there in the den, her air of conscious righteousness when she had said: “You will regret that accusation bitterly when you learn the truth——” What a consummate actress she had become!
Fate had played into his hands, though; he had witnessed her perfidy with his own eyes. Had it not been for his opportune return that night, how easily his suspicions would have been allayed! How contrite he would have been at his doubt of her, and how she and her lover would have gloated over the ease with which he had been deceived!
But the others were looking at him, amazed at his silence, and with an effort he pulled himself together.
“Her last thought was for me!” His voice shook with the irony of it, but to the two men it was an evidence of purely natural emotion. “The thought of it only makes what has come harder for me to bear! Her unselfishness, her devotion——!”
“I know, boy, I know.” Foulkes laid his hand for a moment on Storm’s shoulder. “You must try to remember that you have been far luckier than most men; you have had ten years of such perfect happiness as falls to the lot of few of us!”
“That is true.” Storm bowed his head to conceal the sneer of bitterness which rose unbidden to his lips. “I cannot realize that it has come so suddenly, so horribly to an end!”
A brief discussion of business affairs ensued, and then Wendle Foulkes took his departure. A silence had fallen between the other two which was broken at last by George.
“So that was it!” he murmured as if to himself. “That was why she invented that luncheon at the Ferndale Inn—”