"How has she slept?" he asked eagerly.
"Like a tired baby. Toward morning she awoke sobbing, and I soothed her till she fell asleep again. Just now, when I went into her room with the news that Lord Clandonald also had passed a good night, she was very much more like herself—gentle, yet plucky, and determined to keep up."
"I hate a nervous shock for an impressionable woman. Thank God, it is all no worse! Suppose you and I had happened not to be with her—it makes me sick to think of it! Helen, this isn't the time to beat about the bush to find phrases. Tell me the honest truth. Does Posey love Clandonald?"
"I think so. But she has fought against it from the first. Don't let your sympathy with her at this moment lead you to any rash act of renunciation. She is so young. She will get over it. Besides, she has told me most positively that she could never bring herself to marry a man whose divorced wife is living."
"If that is the only obstacle, it need not count," said Glynn gravely. "The woman who called herself Mrs. Darien died last night—and a blessed solution it is to a miserable snarl. She went back with the housemaid to her hotel in Nice, and they got her into bed. By the time I reached the place the woman, crying bitterly, came down to tell me 'her ladyship' was dead. It was apoplexy—the second attack—precipitated by her insane passion of jealousy of Posey."
"Thank Heaven, it wasn't a murder she had to carry with her into eternity! Our poor darling, Posey—if that horrid flint had struck her in the head where the woman aimed to hit—I can't bear to think of it——"
"Don't. We have shaved the narrow edge, but have escaped. Helen, one of the strangest things that ever happened to me was that Mrs. Darien left in the blotter on her table a sealed letter addressed to me. I took possession of it by showing the landlord and the doctor my visiting card. I don't know what they thought of me. I don't much care. In it she asked my pardon for breaking her pledge to me. Said she was tempted beyond resistance to return to Villa Reine des Fées, that she was dead broke, desperate, expected to die suddenly some day, and wanted me to know that if she ever could have gone straight again it was because of the way I had trusted her."
"But your trust was in vain," said Helen, with the hardness of most good women toward bad ones. "Therefore I can feel no sentiment for her but one of thankfulness that she is out of your hands, in Higher ones."
They walked back and forth for a few moments in the crisp morning air, Nature smiling as she always does after the poignant scenes enacted in her sight. Mr. Winstanley, who was having his breakfast in the rose-wreathed loggia upstairs, and from whom the incident of the attack on Posey had been kept, saw them and waved his kind hand cordially.
Glynn stopped.