"So I heard; 'Lias told me just now on his way down to the village. He said he wouldn't be gone long, for the Colonel wasn't to home.—I wonder what they've turned on all the lights for?" she said, craning her neck to look farther up the road.
Aileen made no reply. She cautioned her again to keep Rag at home. A series of muffled but agonized yelps followed her down the walk.
She stood still in the road and looked about her. Everywhere the great quarry arc-lights were sending their searching rays out upon the quarries and their approaches.
"What shall I do—oh, what shall I do!" was her hopeless unuttered cry.
It seemed to Aileen Armagh, standing there in the road at the entrance to the bridge, as if a powerful X-ray were being directed at that moment upon her whole life so far as she remembered it; and not only upon that, but upon her heart and soul—her thoughts, desires, her secret agony; as if the ray, in penetrating her body and soul, were laying bare her secret to the night:—she still loved him.
"Oh, what shall I do—what shall I do!" was the continual inner cry.
Life was showing itself to her in this experience, as seen through the lens of a quickened imagination, in all its hideousness. Never had she experienced such a sense of loneliness. Never had she realized so forcibly that she was without father and mother, without kin in a foreign country, without a true home and abiding-place. Never had it been brought home to her with such keen pain that she was, in truth, a waif in this great world; that the one solid support for her in this world, her affections, had been ruthlessly cut away from under her by the hand of the man she had loved with all the freshness and joy of her young loving heart. He had been all the more to her because she was alone; the day dreams all the brighter because she believed he was the one to realize them for her—and now!
She walked on slowly.
"What shall I do—what shall I do!" was her inward cry, repeated at intervals. She crossed the bridge. All was chaotic in her thoughts. She had supposed, during the last two months, that all her love was turned to hate,—she hoped it was, for it would help her to bear,—that all her feeling for him, whom she knew she ought to despise, was dead. Why, then, if it were dead, she asked herself now, had she spoken so vehemently to Luigi? And Luigi—where was he—what was he doing?
What was it produced that nervous shock when she learned the last truth from Dulcie Caukins? Was it her shame at his dishonor? No—she knew by the light of the X-ray piercing her soul that the thought of his imprisonment meant absence from her; after all that had occurred, she was obliged to confess that she was still longing for his presence. She hated herself for this confession.—Where was he now?