She was gone, and he heard her step as she went up the stairs and through the hall of the south wing to her own room, and he was alone in the quiet night, wondering what spell was upon him, and if it really were himself standing there, so bewildered and perplexed.
“I’ll walk down the avenue and back as fast as I can, and see if that brings me to myself,” he said, and he tried it, and went to the little cottage, where Gertie used to live, and stood leaning over the fence, and recalling the time when he first saw her there working in the garden with the flush on her cheeks, and her bright hair floating back from her face.
And then he remembered her as he had just seen her, grown to glorious womanhood, with eyes whose glances intoxicated him as he had never been intoxicated since the memorable college spree. Then he walked back again to the house on the Hill, every window of which was darkened, and whose inmates were asleep. But for himself, he felt that he should never sleep again with those two conflicting sensations battling so fiercely in his heart, one cutting like a sharp, keen knife, when he remembered Alice and the words spoken to her less than a week ago, and the other thrilling him with ecstasy and a sense of delicious joy when he thought of the sweet, serene face on which the moonlight had fallen, softening and subduing, and making it like the face of an angel.
Godfrey was in love! He knew it at last, and exclaimed:
“I am in love with Gertie Westbrooke, and believe I have been ever since I first saw her years ago in London. But the knowledge of it has come too late. No Schuyler ever yet broke his word, and I shall not break mine. But if she had received my letters it might have been so different.”
And why had she not received them? How could three letters go astray? Certainly he directed them aright. He surely did the one sent to Schuyler Hill. He had written to his father at the same time and received an answer to that. Why, then, did Gertie not get hers? Had there been foul play, and if so, where and by whom? Suddenly there flashed into his mind a suspicion which made him start, while a strange gleam shone in his eyes, as he said:
“I’ll know the truth to-morrow.”
It was to-morrow now, for the early summer morning was shining on the mountain tops, and tired and excited, Godfrey went at last to his room to get a little rest before the household was astir.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
COLONEL SCHUYLER INTERVIEWS GODFREY.
