Filled with a confused memory, conjured terrors, she hastened down the hall. Very carefully and with great difficulty she opened the heavy front door and stepped out on the porch. In the light that streamed from that east wing, she saw Emil. He was standing with his shoulders against a tree. Her impulse was to run to him; she checked it.
Beneath his disordered mane his face was wild and haggard, and his eyes, raised to a certain window, were filled with an agony no tears had come to relieve. Occasionally his chest lifted with a sigh.
Seized by the selfish anguish of love, Annie thrust out her chin.
He did not belong to her, he belonged to Rachel! She had always suspected.
The next instant, however, the memory of what was flashed before her and like a flame for which there is no fuel, jealousy died in her breast. And what remained? A disconcerted self that wept under its own examining eyes.
"I never could have done what Rachel did," she thought forlornly; "I never could. And Emil knew she was different from me, he knew she was strong; and he loved her. I don't blame him," with a low catch of the breath,—"No, I don't blame him. How could he help it?"
Hour after hour, sick and weak, she clung to a pillar of the porch conscious only of an intensified confusion, a profound loneliness. Gradually, as she listened to those long deep sighs, she ceased to think of herself and longed to console Emil. But henceforth he must hate her as the cause of Rachel's death. The realization sent her into deeper shadow.
So they stood within a few yards of each other and only when dawn began to show faintly over the water, did Annie enter the house.
She saw no one from that east wing but the doctor, who took her wrist, feeling the pulse.
"Not the thing yet," he said, "though a decided improvement over yesterday. But you must show a better face than this."