Was she then so glad to go back, Annie wondered. The truth came out at last.
“I have a presentiment that I shall see Jack in Richmond while I am waiting. I am almost sure of it. Oh, Annie, you don’t know what it will be to me just to hear his voice once more,” she said, and then with a good-bye kiss she was gone and Annie was alone again.
Chapter X.—Author’s Story Continued.
JACK AND ANNIE.
Jack had hoped to spend Thanksgiving with Annie, but had been detained a day longer than he anticipated, and did not reach Richmond until Thanksgiving night. He had come from the west and stopped in Washington the very day that Fanny left for Lovering. He did not know that she had returned from Europe until he overheard two men in the office of the hotel speaking of the Colonel, who, they said, was in a very critical condition, as there was danger at any moment that his rheumatism might attack his heart.
“He will leave a handsome young widow behind him,” one said, while the other nodded and replied, “She’ll console herself readily enough with the lover she jilted. You knew about that, didn’t you?”
The man questioned didn’t know, and his friend began at once to tell the story. But Jack didn’t wait to hear it, and leaving the hotel he walked rapidly through street after street, excited and angry that Fanny’s name should be thus bandied about in public. His love for her was gone, but he could not forget what she had been to him, and it was dreadful to hear her spoken of in that way. As he walked there came over him a desire to see where she lived. It did not take long to find the place, and standing on the opposite side of the street he looked curiously at the great silent house, in which no light was shining except in the hall and from the upper windows of a corner room where the Colonel sat groaning with pain and cursing himself for an idiot that he had let Fanny go even for a day. No one cared for him as she did, and he missed her more than he had thought it possible.
“I’ve been a brute a good many times, but I mean to do better when she comes back. I don’t suppose, though; I can ever make her love me. Confound that Fullerton; I wonder where he is,” he was thinking, just as the electric bell pealed through the house and kept on ringing, as they sometimes do, until the housemaid, who hurried to the door, stopped it.
“Who the devil is that greenhorn ringing like that?” the Colonel said, as every whiz of the bell rasped his nerves afresh.
It was Jack. From seeing the house there had come to him a desire to see Fanny.
“Nothing can better assure her that I am all over it than calling upon her,” he thought, as he crossed the street and touched the electric button.