“Yes; I knew you’d be glad, Grace,” he said; then his face grew grave. “You see Irene was troubled a lot—well about little mistakes she’d made. She was mighty fine about that. When I found I loved her and she loved me, nothing else made any difference. And she’s so strong and fine and splendid you just know it was never in her heart to do wrong!”
“Yes, John,” Grace replied, touched by his simple earnestness, his fine tolerance, his anxiety that she should know that Irene had withheld nothing of her past that could ever cast a shadow upon their happiness.
Late in September Miss Reynolds proposed to Grace that they go to Colorado to look at the mountains. The architect could be relied on to watch the construction of the club house and Miss Reynolds insisted that Grace had earned a vacation.
They established themselves in a hotel that commanded a view of a great valley with snowy summits beyond and Grace tramped and rode and won a measurable serenity of spirit. Miss Reynolds may have thought that amid new scenes the girl would forget Trenton, but the look that came into Grace’s eyes at times discouraged the hope. Then one evening, as they sat in the hotel office reading their mail Miss Reynolds laid a Denver newspaper on Grace’s knee and quietly pointed to a headline: “Death of Mary Graham Trenton.”
The end had come suddenly in the sanitarium where Mrs. Trenton had been under treatment. Her husband, the dispatch stated, was with her when she died.
“She seemed ill when she was at my house,” remarked Miss Reynolds; “she was frightfully nervous and seemed to be constantly forcing herself. That tired look in her eyes gave the impression of dissipation. I’m ashamed to say it but I really thought she might be addicted to drugs.”
“I’m sorry,” Grace murmured, numbed, bewildered by the news. She had never taken the reports of Mrs. Trenton’s illness seriously, believing Ward’s wife was feigning illness to arouse her husband’s pity—perhaps in the hope of reawakening his love. It had never occurred to her that she might die.
As soon as possible Grace excused herself and went to her room, where she flung herself on the bed and lay for a long time in the dark, pondering. In spite of their agreement not to write she had hoped constantly to hear from him; and his silence she had interpreted as meaning that he had found it easy to forget. She now attributed his silence to the remorse that had probably assailed him when he found that Mrs. Trenton was hopelessly ill.
VIII
Grace had been home a week when she received a letter from Trenton, written in Pittsburgh. He was closing up his home; looking after the settlement of Mrs. Trenton’s estate. She had bequeathed her considerable property to the societies for social reform in which she had been interested. He hoped to be in Indianapolis shortly, he wrote, and continued: