"Why did you not send for me?"
"We did send. I wrote to you, and Louise took the note at once to the Lodge. But you had already gone--turning Madame Baret's brains upside down with the shock."
"You might have sent it after me to England."
"Of course I might--if I had only known you were gone to England. How was I to know it? I might be wishing to get a note to some one in the moon, but not see my way clear to writing the address. It was weeks, and weeks, and weeks, Mr. St. John, before we ever heard a syllable of you, whether you were in England or in any other part of the known world, or whether you were at the bottom of the sea."
"And she never married de la Chasse?"
The words seemed spoken as a remark, not as a question. Rose, who seemed to have a touch of one of her ironical moods coming on, answered it:
"Would you have had her marry him when death had set in? After the doctors had met that day, it was known throughout the house that nothing could save her. At least, they said so. The old malady of the spring had but been lying dormant; it was in her still; and the terrible trouble she went through had brought it forth again. Under the very happiest circumstances, had she married you, even--and I suppose that might have been her idea of happiness," added Rose, satirically--"she could not have lived long. De la Chasse saw her for a few minutes on the day they were to have been married, and expressed himself very much concerned, and all that, as a matter of course; I don't suppose he broke his heart over it."
"And she has been ill ever since?"
"Ever since. The disease has fluctuated, as you may imagine; some weeks she would be at death's door, some weeks comparatively well; but it has all the while been progressing on gradually to the ending. Frederick St. John"--and Rose stepped up to him in her excitement--"I don't believe you were ever absent for one minute from her mind; by day and by night it was filled with that miserable love for you; and the yearning wish, destined not to be gratified, was ever upon her--that you would come and see her before she died."
"Why did you not let me know it?--why could you not have written to me?" he asked, in a sharp tone of pain.