Ruth made a motion to go, but Mrs Dene lingered. Her kind eyes, her fair little faded face, were troubled.
“Madame Bordier says the young lady tells her she has met you before, Rex.”
“Yes, in Paris”; for his life he could not have kept down the crimson flush that darkened his cheeks and made his temples throb.
Mrs Dene’s manner grew a little colder.
“She seems very nice. You knew her people, of course.”
“No, I never met any of her people,” answered Rex, feeling like a kicked coward. Ruth interposed once more.
“People!” said Ruth, impatiently. “Of course Rex only knows nice people. Come, mother!”
Putting her arm around the old lady, she moved across the hall with decision. As they passed into the cheerless little room, Rex held open the door. Ruth, entering after her mother, looked in his face. It had grown thinner; shadows were deep in the temples; from the dark circles under the eyes to the chin ran a line of pain. She held out her hand to him. He bent and kissed it.
He went and stood in the porch, trying to collect his thoughts. The idea of this meeting between Ruth and Yvonne was insupportable. Why had he not taken means—any, every means to prevent it? He cursed himself. He called himself a coward. He wondered how much Ruth divined. The thought shamed him until his cheeks burned again. And all the while a deep undercurrent of feeling was setting toward that drooping little figure in black, as he had seen it for a moment when she alighted from the carriage and was supported to a room upstairs. Heavens! How it reminded him of that first day in the Place de la Concorde! Why was she in mourning? What did the doctor mean by “weakness of the heart”? What was she doing on mountaintops, and on the stage of a theater if she had heart disease? He started with a feeling that he must go and put a stop to all this folly. Then he remembered the letter. She had told him another man had the right to care for her. Then she was at this moment deserted for the second time, as well as faithless to still another lover!—to how many more? And it was through him that a woman of such a life was brought into contact with Ruth! And Ruth’s parents had trusted him; they thought him a gentleman. His brain reeled.
The surging waves of shame and self-contempt subsided, were forgotten. He heard the wind sough in the Luxembourg trees, he smelled the pink flowering chestnuts, a soft voice was in his ear, a soft touch on his arm, her breath on his cheek, the old, old faces came crowding up. Clifford’s laugh rang faintly, Braith’s grave voice; odd bits and ends of song floated out from the shadows of that past and through the troubled dream of face and laugh and music, so long, so long passed away, he heard the gentle voice of Yvonne: “Rex, Rex, be true to me; I will come back!”