Not a word was spoken by either during the ride, and it would have been impossible to have found two more utterly wretched people in all that great city.
Upon entering their house, they found Emil Correlli in a state bordering on frenzy, occasioned by the escape of Edith, and this circumstance served for a few moments to distract their thoughts from their own troubles.
Mr. Goddard was intensely relieved by the intelligence, and plainly betrayed it in his manner.
When angrily called to account for it by his brother-in-law, he at once replied, with an air of reckless defiance:
"Yes, I am glad of it—I would even have helped the girl to get away; indeed, I was planning to do so, for such a dastardly fraud as you perpetrated upon her should never be allowed to prosper."
He was rewarded for this speech, so loyal to Edith, only by an angry oath, to which, however, he paid no attention.
Strangely enough, Anna Correlli, after the first emotion of surprise and dismay had passed, paid no heed to the exciting conversation; she had sunk into a chair by the window, where she sat pale and silent, and absolutely motionless, save for the wild restlessness of her fiery black eyes.
Mr. Goddard, finding the atmosphere so disagreeable, finally left the room, and, mounting the stairs, shut himself in his own chamber, while the enraged lover dashed out of the house to the nearest telegraph office to send the message that caused the policeman to intercept Edith upon her arrival in New York.
A few moments later, Mrs. Goddard—as we will, from courtesy, still call her—crept wearily up to her room, where, tottering to a couch, she threw herself prone upon her face, moaning and shivering with the agony she could no longer control.
The blow, which for twenty years she had been dreading, had fallen at last; but it was far more crushing and bitter than she had ever dreamed it could be.