For him, he walks away, stopping a moment in front of the next-door house to light a fresh cigar, and glancing at the green grounds, with their graveled paths, goes away with a fancy in his mind of a fairy child with violet eyes and golden curls at play beside the marble fountain under its dashing spray.
Grace Grey!
He walks on down the lonely street, his heart full of Grace Grey, not Grace Winans; full of the child and girl whose light steps have danced down this street in happier days—not the Senator's sad-eyed wife—he has no right to think of her. But this fairy, winning child, this innocent, joyous maiden, who grows into shape and life in his loving imagination—she is his own, his very own, to hold in his "heart of hearts," to think of, to idealize, to worship. He creates in his own mind the goddess she was, goes back from the days when he first knew her to those earlier days when Stella De Vere knew her. Then an idle remembrance of Stella's praise of him sets him thinking. Was it true? Would any woman have loved him as well with his one arm as with two? Would Grace have done it had he tried to win her? For a moment a half-wish that he had tried, that he had won her for his own idolized wife, overwhelmed him.
"She might have been quietly content with me," he thinks. "At least she should never have known the suffering, the passionate pathos that darkens her young life now."
Too late! "Her place in his poor life is vacant for ever," and, as Grace has said once, he repeats:
"Fate is above us all."
He goes back to his visions of the child and maiden again; his heart thrills with passionate fondness for the happy child, the lovely girl whose dual lives have merged into the shadowed life of beautiful Grace Winans. Fancies come and go, the "light that never was on sea nor land" shining over his mild pictures of what "might have been," and never opium-eater's visions were fairer than the ideal dreams that go curling up in the blue, fantastic smoke-wreaths of Captain Clendenon's cigar.
Sunset drives him to his hotel, chilled and thoughtful. The winter sunshine, pleasant enough in this southern city, in its declining, has left a chill in the air that seems to strike to his heart. At the door he tosses away the remains of that magic cigar and goes up to his room, where a cheerful fire throws its genial warmth over everything, and brings out the stale odor of cigar smoke that clings to him. He throws off his coat, and in his white shirt-sleeves, pours fresh water from the pitcher into the basin.
"Phew!" he says, in disgust, "how smoky I am!" pushing back his neat linen cuff and bending over, in manly fashion, to dip head and hand into the water; he gives a slight cough, then, gasping, bends lower, while a crimson stream flows fast from his lips into the crystal water, turning it all to blood.
Again and again that slight cough, again and again that warm tide flowing from his lips—and yet he seems not in the least surprised, not in the least alarmed, only steadies himself, with his hand pressed on the edge of the wash-stand, and watches the flowing life-stream, his face growing white as marble.