"Where have you been? Why did you hide from me?"
"You forbade me," she said, stroking his hair. "And it was quite right. The dear Dean told me—and I quite understood. If I'd gone to Haggart then there'd have been more trouble. I should have tried to get my old place back. And now it's all over. You can give me all I want, because I can't live. It's only a question of months, perhaps weeks. Nobody could blame you, could they? People don't laugh when—it's death. It simplifies things so—doesn't it?"
She smiled, and nestled to him again.
"What do you mean?" he said, almost violently. "Why are you so ill?"
"It was Bosnia first, and then—being miserable—I suppose. And Poitiers was very cold—and the nuns very stuffy, bless them—they wouldn't let me have air enough."
He groaned aloud while he remembered his winter in London, in the forlorn luxury of the Park Lane house.
"Where have you been?" he repeated.
"Oh! I went to the Soeurs Blanches—you remember?—where I used to be. You went there, didn't you?"—he made a sign of miserable assent—"but I made them promise not to tell! There was an old mistress of novices there still who used to be very fond of me. She got one of the houses of the Sacré Coeur to take me in—at Poitiers. They thought they were gathering a stray sheep back into the fold, you understand, as I was brought up a Catholic—of sorts. And I didn't mind!" The familiar intonation, soft, complacent, humorous, rose like a ghost between them. "I used to like going to mass. But this Easter they wanted to make me 'go to my duties'—you know what it means?—and I wouldn't. I wanted to confess." She shuddered and drew his face down to hers again—"but only once—to—you—and then, well then, to die, and have done with it. You see, I knew one can't get on long with three-quarters of a lung. And they were rather tiresome—they didn't understand. So three weeks ago I drew some money out and said good-bye to them. Oh! they were very kind, and very sorry for me. They wanted me to take a maid, and I meant to. But the one they found wouldn't come with me when she saw how ill I was—and it all lingered on—so one day I just walked out to the railway-station and went to Paris. But Paris was rainy—and I felt I must see the sun again. So I stayed two nights at a little hotel maman used to go to—horrid place!—and each night I read your speeches in the reading-room—and then I got my things from Poitiers, and started—"
A fit of coughing stopped her, coughing so terrible and destructive that he almost rushed for help. But she restrained him. She made him understand that she wanted certain remedies from her own room across the corridor. He went for them. The door of this room had been shut by the observant Dell, who was watching the passage from his own bedroom farther on. When Ashe had opened it he found himself face to face as it were with the foaming stream outside. The window, as he had seen it before, was wide open to the water-fall just beyond it, and the temperature was piercingly cold and damp. The furniture was of the roughest, and a few of Kitty's clothes lay scattered about. As he fumbled for a light, there hovered before his eyes the remembrance of their room in Hill Street, strewn with chiffons and all the elegant and costly trifles that made the natural setting of its mistress.
He found the medicines and hurried back. She feebly gave him directions. "Now the strychnine!—and some brandy."