“I wish it were so,” Allestree said quietly, hurrying on with his disagreeable task; “it seems that she was out to-day for a long time alone; no one apparently knows much about it except the elevator boy and he says she was away from the hotel four hours or more. As nearly as we know she was on foot and in the streets most of that time. I know she was in my studio while I was out;” he colored as he spoke; he had found his mother’s letter on the floor and piecing the facts together had divined much. “She came home alone, went to her rooms and was found there later, unconscious, on the floor.”
“Good God, where was Gerty?” Fox exclaimed, with a gesture of horror.
“Margaret had sent her to Mrs. White with Estelle; there was some painful scene in the street with the child—” Allestree stopped an instant and then meeting his cousin’s eye he hurried on—“when Gerty finally got to the hotel and found her it was too late; the doctors say that if help had been at hand she might have been saved. As it was she never regained consciousness. Gerty telephoned to my mother, but she will not be back until to-morrow morning; when I got there Margaret was gone.”
Fox sank into a chair by the table, and propping his head on his hands stared blankly at a sheet of paper before him. “Why was I not told?” he demanded hoarsely.
“Gerty tried to get you, both at the Capitol and here, but we could not find you.”
“I was at the club,” Fox exclaimed and then: “Merciful heaven, Allestree, how terrible, how harrowing! How impossible to realize!”
Allestree looked at him thoughtfully. “Do you think so?” he said, “it has seemed to me for more than a year that I saw death in her face; she had, poor girl, a face of tragedy.”
Fox groaned, covering his own face with his hands. His anger against her of a moment before smote him with horrible reproach. Living, he had ceased to love her, dead, she seemed suddenly to fill his life to the exclusion of all else; she came to him again in the guise of her thoughtless, happy, inconsequent youth which had forged the links between them. He rose and began to walk the floor, his pale face distorted with passion. “My God!” he cried suddenly; “I—Allestree, is it possible that she divined the truth? That she knew me for what I was, a sham, a mockery, a whited sepulchre?”
Knowing him and the unhappy woman, whose love for him had wrecked her life, Allestree knew too much to speak; he was silent.
The storm of his cousin’s passion rose and beat itself against the inevitable refusal of death. Poor Margaret! a few hours ago she had held the power to ruin his career, now she had slipped quietly away from him into the great Silence; the mute appeal of her unhappy love touched his very soul as it had never touched it in life; the impossibility of laying the blame for life’s miseries on the dead came to him with overwhelming force, and she, who a moment before had been guilty, in his thoughts, of embarrassing his future and blighting his life, became suddenly the victim of his vanity, his idle pleasure seeking which she had mistaken for love. He remembered, with sudden horror and self loathing, his coldness, his bitterness toward her, and the manner in which she had received his proposal of marriage. A swift electrifying realization of the scene tore away his selfish absorption; his manner of asking her had been almost an insult to her high spirited pride, to her love, which had humiliated itself by the first confession on that night in the deserted ballroom where she had poured out the wretchedness of her soul. She had come to him wounded, homeless, and he had all but cast her off in his passionate selfishness, his hatred of the loveless marriage which his honor had bound him to make.