"Nevertheless, I saw her dead and in her coffin," persisted his companion, with positive emphasis.
"Now you talk as if you were losing your mind," he answered, with white lips.
"I am not. Do you not remember I told you one morning, I was going to spend a couple of days with a friend at Fiesole?"
"Yes."
"Well, I had read of that tragedy that very day, and then hid the paper, but I did not go to Fiesole at all. I took the first train for Rome."
"Anna!"
"I wanted to be sure," she cried, excitedly. "I was jealous of her, I—hated her; and I knew that if the report was true I should be at rest. I went to the place where they had taken her. Some one had cared for her very tenderly—she lay as if asleep, and looked like a beautiful piece of sculpture in her white robe; one could hardly believe that she was—dead. But they told me they were going to—to bury her that afternoon unless some one came to claim her. They asked me if I had known her—if she was a friend of mine. I told them no—she was nothing to me; I had simply come out of curiosity, having seen the story of her tragic end in a paper. Then I took the next train back to Florence."
"Why have you never told me this before, Anna?" Gerald Goddard inquired, with lips that were perfectly colorless, while he laid his hand upon the back of a chair for support.
"Why?" she flashed out jealously at him. "Why should I talk of her to you? She was dead—she could never come between us, and I wished to put her entirely out of my mind, since I had satisfied myself of the fact."
"Did—did you hear anything of—of—"