“What in heaven’s name has happened?” he said, as if partially to himself. “Am I Adam Rust? Are you Garde? Say good-by?——Dearest, has anything happened?”
She nodded to him, forcing back the sob that arose in her throat. “Something—something has happened,” she repeated. For maidenly shame she could not broach the subject of the Indian child.
He was silent for a moment before replying.
“But you came to-night and gave me the keys, an hour or so ago,” he said, in wonderment and confusion. “You did that?”
“I—couldn’t—do less,” she answered, mastering her love and anguish by a mighty resolution.
“Do you mean—you would have done the same for anybody?” he asked. And seeing her nod an affirmative he gave a little laugh. “I am crazy now, or I have been crazy before,” he told himself. “Something has happened. Something—Of course—it couldn’t help happening, in time. Some one has told you——I might have known it would happen.... And yet—you once said you could wait for me fifty years. And I believed it.... Well, I thank you. I have been amused.”
His broken sentences seemed to Garde to fill in the possible gaps of the story—to make his confession complete. But Adam had, in reality, stopped himself on the verge of accusing her of listening to the love-making of some one other than himself, in his absence.
She made no reply to what he had said. She felt there was absolutely nothing she could say. Her heart would have cried out to him wildly. When he spoke so lightly of the fifty years which she could have waited, she swayed where she stood, ready to drop. Almost one atom more of impulse and she would have thrown herself in his arms, crying out her love passionately, in defiance of the story of his perfidy. But her honor, her maidenly resolution, steeled her in the nick of time. Though her heart should break, she could not accept the gilded offer of such a love.
“Oh, Garde—sweetheart, forgive me,” said Adam, after a moment of terrible silence. “I have wronged you. Forgive me and tell me it is all some nightmare—some dreadful——”
The night stillness was broken by the sound of men running swiftly up the street. Randolph had thought of the possibility of Adam’s visit to Mistress Merrill.