"You think," he gasped hoarsely, after a long pause,—"you think—that—she is—dead?"
"I think that she went out of this house in a desperate state of mind. She was seen—not by me, for I should have thought it my duty to stop her if I had seen her so—she was seen by one of the servants crying and sobbing awfully as she went away upon that last afternoon."
"And she was never seen again?"
"Never by me."
"And—you—you think she went out of this house with the intention of—of—destroying herself?"
The words died away in a hoarse whisper, and it was by the motion of his white lips that Barbara Simmons perceived what the young man meant.
"I do, sir."
"Have you any—particular reason for thinking so?"
"No reason beyond what I have told you, sir."
Edward Arundel bent his head, and walked away to hide his blanched face. He tried instinctively to conceal this mental suffering, as he had sometimes hidden physical torture in an Indian hospital, prompted by the involuntary impulse of a brave man. But though the woman's words had come upon him like a thunderbolt, he had no belief in the opinion they expressed. No; his young spirit wrestled against and rejected the awful conclusion. Other people might think what they chose; but he knew better than they. His wife was not dead. His life had been so smooth, so happy, so prosperous, so unclouded and successful, that it was scarcely strange he should be sceptical of calamity,—that his mind should be incapable of grasping the idea of a catastrophe so terrible as Mary's suicide.