She might answer, briefly, that Owen was still at Greenriver, and, so far as she knew, in good health and spirits. As she framed the words she had a mental vision of Owen as she had last seen him, thin, pale, haggard, with the fire of a restless despair burning in his blue eyes. Although he went out and about, and greeted his friends much as usual, no one could doubt that the whole man was consumed as by a devouring flame. He had been tortured with terrible neuralgic headaches all through the winter; but though the doctor urged him to try the effect of a sojourn abroad, nothing would induce him to leave Greenriver.
His tentative inquiries in Italy having proved futile, he clung to the idea that Toni was still in England; and the thought that she might return to her home and find him gone was one which recurred to him like a nightmare whenever he took even the short journey up to town.
"What shall I say, I wonder?" Eva sat gazing thoughtfully into the fire, while the Spring twilight fell over the river which glided so quietly past her windows. "If I say she is forgotten it will almost break her heart; yet if I tell her that her husband is breaking his heart to find her, will she come to England instantly and humble herself till he takes her back into his home?"
As she sat there Eva had a sudden vivid sense of the contrast between her own spoilt life and that of the girl whose pitiful cry still rang in her consciousness and would not be silenced.
Her own life was ruined, she told herself bitterly. But in that illuminating moment Eva saw the truth for the first time. She herself was to blame for the ruin. She had brought all the shame, all the disgrace upon herself, and the bitter experience of her prison life had been only the reaping of the harvest which she, by her own act, had sown.
But Toni's happiness had been broken and spoilt by other means. It was her very love for her husband which had made her so fatally ready to believe that only by leaving him could she give him the freedom which he was supposed—by his wife—to desire. And Eva knew quite well that without her connivance and encouragement Leonard Dowson would never have dared to utter his proposal to the young wife of Owen Rose.
Yet if she gave in now and begged Toni to return, assuring her, as she knew she might safely do, of her husband's ready forgiveness, would not the spectacle of Toni's ensuing happiness bring all the more cruelly home to her the wretchedness which must be her own portion from henceforth?
Although Jim Herrick treated her with unvarying kindness and consideration, Eva had always the miserable conviction that his love for her was dead; and although she never showed any feeling in their daily intercourse, even her bitter and reckless heart was sometimes sore within her.
Long she sat, wondering how best to treat this unexpected appeal from a far country; and only when the trim maid who had replaced the more haphazard Mrs. Swastika entered with the lighted lamp did Eva rouse herself from her reverie.
Then, however, she got pen and paper and sat down at the table to frame some sort of reply. It was not an easy task. With Toni's letter lying before her, she found it strangely difficult to begin; and was still sitting staring at the blank sheet of paper when a sudden deep bark from Olga, who was lying, as usual, nose on paws, in the tiny hall, made her start to her feet.