“For your own sake, for your child’s sake, be careful. Do not tell any one what you have told me. The penalty of deception is great, and your penalty will be to keep it up a little while longer. When I am married to Jacqueline, you will have a friend, a home. Then, if you want to take off those black garments, to be yourself, you may count on me; but, for the present, be prudent. You are so impulsive.”
But Judith now was weeping violently and accusing herself. The reaction had come. Throckmorton felt strangely thrilled by her emotion. He comforted her, he held her hands, and even pressed kisses on them. In a few minutes he had soothed her. The old habits of self-control came back to her. She rallied bravely, and in half an hour she was quite composed. But it was the composure of despair. She remembered, then, had Throckmorton but loved her, the only obstacle between them would have been shown to be imaginary.
Throckmorton stayed late. In spite of Judith’s quietness, he felt unhappy about her. She was too quiet, too deathly pale. He felt an intense pity for her, and he feared that she and her child would not much longer find a home under the roof of Barn Elms.
Three days more passed. There was still no word from Jacqueline, and Mrs. Temple wrote that the general’s gout bade fair to be a much more serious matter than they had first anticipated. It might be that the wedding—which was to be of the quietest sort—might have to be postponed. But that was nothing to Mrs. Temple and the general, who reveled in the luxury of a meeting where Beverley was remembered, praised, and eulogized as can be done only by Southerners. Nor did it seem to matter to Jacqueline. In fact, Throckmorton and Judith appeared to be the only persons particularly interested in it. As for Freke, he had not been seen by either of them since the day the Barn Elms people left.
Throckmorton continued to spend his evenings at Barn Elms. The idea of Judith sitting solitary and alone in the drawing-room the whole long, dull evening, drew him irresistibly. Not one line had Jacqueline written, either to him or to Judith. Nor had Throckmorton written again to her. He was not the man to give a woman more than one opportunity to snub him. In his heart he was cruelly mortified; his pride, of which he had much, was hurt. He feared that it was a part of that arrogance which first youth shows to maturity.
On the eighth day after Jacqueline’s departure something like alarm began to possess Judith. She called it superstition, and tried to put it away from her. The day had been dull and gloomy—a fine, drizzling rain falling. The flat, monotonous landscape looked inexpressibly dreary in the gray mist that hung low over the trees. It was dark long before six o’clock. The night had closed in, and Judith, sitting alone in the drawing-room, had risen to light the lamp, when she heard the front door open softly, and the next instant she recognized Jacqueline’s peculiar light step—so light that even Mrs. Temple’s keen ears could not always detect it when fits of restlessness seized the girl at night, and she would walk up and down her room over her mother’s head. And in a moment Jacqueline came into the room, and up to Judith, and looked at her with strange, agonized eyes.
The surprise, the shock of seeing her at that hour and in that way, was extreme; and Judith’s first words as her hands fell on Jacqueline’s shoulder were:
“Jacqueline, you are wet through.”
“I know it,” answered Jacqueline, in a voice as unlike her own as her looks; “I have been out in the rain for hours and hours!”