Meanwhile, the encounter was inevitable, since they were moving toward William, and William, after a moment of almost visible hesitation, was moving toward them.
“Why, how d’you do, Colonel Denbigh?” said young Carter nervously. “I—I haven’t seen you since I came back.”
“No,” replied the colonel dryly, shaking hands. “I live at the same place, though.”
William Carter blushed. He and Virginia greeted each other silently. She was quite natural and sweet, but William’s blush deepened. Across the ocean, under the spell of other emotions and far different surroundings, it had seemed so easy to forget home ties—even ties of honor; but it was not easy here. The very palings in the old fences seemed to shriek at him.
He remembered painfully the sleepless night he had spent in Paris after that wild moment when he forgot himself and asked Fanchon to marry him. It had been a night haunted with his own sense of the fine things in life, and he remembered that—after the tumult had passed—he had had the sense to burn Virginia’s letters. He could see, even here, the pile of ashes in the little grate in his room at the hotel. The ashes of Virginia’s faithful, cheerful, loving words! He shuddered.
“We were just going to call on your wife,” said Virginia simply.
As she spoke she raised her clear, untroubled eyes to his. It seemed as if she wanted to reassure him by a look—since they could scarcely speak of it again—that he was forgiven. She wanted bygones to be bygones.
“Do you think she’s at home?” she added gently, partly because William seemed incapable of speech.
He pulled himself together.
“I don’t know—I suppose she is.”