“I haven’t the least idea. She asked me not to follow her movements, and I never have.”
“Then you do not even know whether she is living or dead?”
“Yes; I know that much. She is not dead. I feel her in the world. If she went out of it, I believe I should know it. Besides, I would have been informed of that. She spoke of it, and said so.”
There was a moment’s pause, which Martha broke.
“Will you tell me this,” she said, “whether you are as hopeless about it all as you were when I last spoke to you of it?”
“Exactly as hopeless. When a thing is absolute, my dear, it doesn’t have degrees. I have never been anything else than hopeless since the hour of my last interview with her. She told me then,” he said, with a sort of cold conciseness, “that her first wish was to set me absolutely free. She said she wanted me to marry again. She said that just as soon as we had lived apart the time required by law for a divorce, she wanted me to get it. She said she was sorry there was no way to get it sooner. She said, also, that she would take back her maiden name.”
He got up, thrust his hands into his pockets, and, walking over to the window, stood there for a moment. Then he turned suddenly, and came and stood in front of Martha, looking her directly in the eyes. She saw by that look that he was calm and steady, and so she ventured to question him a little further.
“Do you know whom she lives with?” she asked.
“With an aunt, whose life, as she told me, is utterly out of the world that we knew together. She said that, on this account, there was good reason to hope that we would never meet again.”
Martha, who felt that this subject might not be spoken of between them again, continued to question him as he stood and looked down at her with a perfect consciousness of self-possession.