It was a natural enough question, and Daisy roused herself to answer it, and said quickly: "He is the son of my husband's father."
"Oh, oui," Pauline rejoined, a little mystified as to the exact relationship existing between Guy Thornton and her teacher's husband, whom she supposed was dead, as Daisy had only confided to madame the fact of a divorce.
"What date is the paper?" Daisy asked, and on being told she said softly to herself: "I see, it was too late."
There was in her mind no doubt as to what the result would have been had her letter been in time; no doubt of Guy's preference for her; no regret that she had written to him, except that the knowledge that she loved him at last might make him wretched with thinking "what might have been," and with the bitter pain which cut her heart like a knife there was mingled a pity for Guy, who would perhaps suffer more than she did, if that were possible. She never once thought of retribution, or of murmuring against her fate, but accepted it meekly, albeit she staggered under the load and grew faint as she thought of the lonely life before her, and she so young.
Slowly she went back to her room, while Pauline walked up and down the garden trying to make out the relationship between the newly married Thornton and her teacher.
"The son of her husband's father?" she repeated, until at last a meaning dawned upon her, and she said: "Then he must be her brother-in-law; but why didn't she say so? Maybe, though, that is the English way of putting it," and, having thus settled the matter, Pauline joined her mother, who was asking for Mrs. Thornton.
"Gone to her room, and her brother-in-law is married. It was marked in a paper and I read it to her, and she's sick," Pauline said, without, however, in the least connecting the sickness with the marriage.
Daisy did not come down to dinner that night, and the maid who called her the next morning reported her as ill and acting very strangely. Through the summer a malarial fever had prevailed to some extent in and about Rouen, and the physician whom Madame Lafarcade summoned to the sick girl expressed a fear that she was coming down with it, and ordered her kept as quiet as possible.
"She seems to have something weighing on her mind. Has she heard any bad news from home?" he asked, as in reply to his question where her pain was the worst Daisy always answered:
"It reached him too late—too late, and I am so sorry."