Eleanor Monckton walked slowly back to the house by the side of her husband, whose eyes never left his wife’s face during that short walk between the garden-gate and the long French window by which the two girls had left the drawing-room. Even in the dusk, Gilbert Monckton could see that his wife’s face was unusually pale.
She spoke to him as they entered the drawing-room, laying her hand upon his arm as she addressed him, and looking earnestly at him in the red firelight.
“Is Mr. de Crespigny really dying, Gilbert?” she asked.
“I fear that, from what the medical men say, there is very little doubt about it. The old man is going fast.”
Eleanor paused for a few moments, with her head bent, and her face hidden from her husband.
Then, suddenly looking up, she spoke to him again; this time with intense earnestness.
“Gilbert, I want to see Mr. de Crespigny before he dies; I want to see him alone—I must see him!”
The lawyer stared at his wife in utter bewilderment. What, in Heaven’s name, was the meaning of this sudden energy, this intense eagerness, which blanched the colour in her cheeks, and held her breathless? Her friendly feeling for the invalid, her womanly pity for an old man’s infirmities, could never have been powerful enough to cause such emotion.
“You want to see Maurice de Crespigny, Eleanor?” repeated Mr. Monckton, in a tone of undisguised wonder. “But why do you want to see him?”
“I have something to tell him—something that he must know before he dies.”