An exclamation burst from him.
"My God!" he groaned.
[Illustration: Hilda's Arrival At The Hotel Gibbon.]
For a moment he stood staring at them, and then advanced with a rapid pace.
It was Gualtier.
Hilda recognized him, but said nothing. She could not speak a word. She wished to ask for something, but dreaded to ask that question, for she feared the reply. In that interval of fear and hesitation Gualtier had leisure to see, in one brief glance, all the change that had come over her who had once been so strong, so calm, so self-reliant, so unmoved by the passions, the feelings, and the weaknesses of ordinary humanity. He saw and shuddered.
Thin and pale and wan, she now stood before him, tottering feebly with unsteady step, and staying herself on the arm of her maid. Her cheeks, which, when he last saw them, were full and rounded with the outlines of youth and health, were now hollow and sunken. Around her eyes were those dark clouded marks which are the sure signs of weakness and disease. Her hands, as they grasped the arms of the maid, were thin and white and emaciated. Her lips were bloodless. It was the face of Hilda, indeed, but Hilda in sorrow, in suffering, and in grief--such a face as he had never imagined. But there were some things in that face which belonged to the Hilda of old, and had not changed. The eyes still flashed dark and piercing; they at least had not failed; and still their penetrating gaze rested upon him with no diminution in their power. Still the rich masses of ebon hair wreathed themselves in voluminous folds, and from out the luxuriant black masses of that hair the white face looked forth with its pallor rendered more awful from the contrast. Yet now that white face was a face of agony, and the eyes which, in their mute entreaty, were turned toward him, were fixed and staring. As he came up to her she grasped his arm; her lips moved; but for a time no audible sound escaped. At length she spoke, but it was in a whisper:
"_Is he alive_?"
And that was all that she said. She stood there panting, and gasping for breath, awaiting his reply with a certain awful suspense.