She waited for him to speak again, but he sat silent, cutting his way slowly through the big volume, without making one jagged edge, so steady was the movement of the hand that grasped the paper-knife. His eyes were bent upon the book; his face was in shadow.
“Is that all, sir?” Bell asked at last, when she had grown tired of his silence.
“Yes, Mrs. Bell, that will do. Good-night.”
When the door closed upon her, he flung the book away from him, sprang to his feet, and began to pace the room, up and down its length of forty feet, from hearth to door.
“Sisters!—and so fond of each other!” he muttered. “My God, this is fatality! In this, as in the death of my child, I am helpless. The wanton neglect of my servants cost me the idol of my heart. It was not my fault—not mine—but I lost her. And now I am again the victim of fatality—blind, impotent—groping in the dark web—caught in the inexorable net.”
He went back to his desk, and re-read Mildred’s letter in the light of the lamp.
“She leaves me because our marriage is unholy in her eyes,” he said to himself. “What will she think when she knows all—as she must know, I suppose, sooner or later? Sooner or later all things are known, says one of the wise ones of the earth. Sooner or later! She is on the track now. Sooner or later she must know—everything.”
He flung himself into a low chair in front of the hearth, and sat with his elbows on his knees staring at the fire.
“If it were that question of legality only,” he said to himself, “if it were a question of Church, law, bigotry, prejudice, I should not fear the issue. My love for her, and hers for me, ought to be stronger than any such prejudice. It would need but the first sharp pain of severance to bring her back to me, my fond and faithful wife, willing to submit her judgment to mine, willing to believe, as I believe, that such marriages are just and holy, such bonds pure and true, all over the world, even though one country may allow and another disallow, one colony tie the knot and another loosen it. If it were that alone which parts us, I should not fear. But it is the past, the spectral past, which rises up to thrust us asunder. Her sister! And they loved each other as David and Jonathan loved, with the love whose inheritance is a life-long regret.”