Very conscious of the fact was Karl himself. He raised his hat from his brow as he went home, to wipe away the fever-damp gathered there. He remembered to have read somewhere of one of the tortures devised by inquisitionists in the barbarous days gone by. An unhappy prisoner would be shut in a spacious room; and, day by day, watched the walls contracting by some mysterious agency, and closing around him. It seemed to Karl that the walls of the world were closing around him now. Or, rather, round one who had become dearer to him in his dread position than himself--his most ill-fated brother.
At home or abroad there was not a single ray of light to illumine or cheer the gloom. Abroad lay apprehension; at home only unhappiness, an atmosphere of estrangement that seemed to have nothing homelike or true in it. Karl went in, expecting to see the pony-chaise waiting. He had been about to drive his wife out; but, alarmed by the report whispered to him by Hewitt, and unable to rest in tranquillity, he had gone forth to see about what it meant. But the chaise was not there. Maclean was at work on the lawn.
"Has Lady Andinnian gone!" he enquired, rather surprised--for Lucy had not learned to drive yet.
"My leddy is somewhere about the garden I think, Sir Karl," was the gardener's answer. "She sent the chay away again."
He found his wife sitting in a retired walk, a book in her hand, apparently reading it. Lucy was fading. Her face, worn and thin, had that indescribable air of pitiful sadness in it that tells of some deep-seated, ever-present sorrow. Karl was all too conscious of it. He blamed her for her course of conduct; but he did not attempt to conceal from himself that the trouble had originated with him.
"I am very sorry to have kept you waiting, Lucy," he began. "I had to go to Smith's on a little matter of business. You have sent the chaise away."
"I sent it away. The pony was tired of waiting. I don't care to go out at all to-day."
She spoke in an indifferent, almost a contemptuous tone. We must not blame her. Her naturally-sweet temper was being sorely tried: day by day her husband seemed to act so as to afford less promise of any reconciliation.
"I could not help it," was all he answered.
She glanced up at the weary accent. If ever a voice spoke of unresisted despair, his did then. Her resentment vanished: her sympathy was aroused.