"She died ten minutes ago."
Only ten minutes! Jimmy had stared blankly at the face of the weeping maid, and then mechanically taken his watch from his pocket and looked at it. Only ten minutes! If he had not had to hang about for a taxi he would have been in time to have seen her.
Now he would never see her again; as yet he had had no time in which to analyse his feelings; he was numbed with the shock of it all; he listened like a man in a dream to the details they told him. It passed him by unmoved that she had been in Mortlake's car when the accident occurred; it had conveyed nothing to his mind when they told him that the only words she had spoken during her brief flash of consciousness had been to ask for him.
As he stood there in the familiar scented pink drawing-room, his thoughts had flown with odd incongruity to Christine.
She would be kind to him—she would be sorry for him; his whole heart and soul had been on fire to get back to her—to get away from the harrowing silence of the flat which had always been associated in his mind with fun and laughter, and the happiest days of his life.
A fur coat of Cynthia's lay across a chair-back; so many times he had helped her slip into it after her performance at the theatre was ended. He knew so well the faint scent that always clung to it; he shuddered and averted his eyes. She would never wear it again; she was dead! He wondered what would become of it—what would become of all her clothes, and her jewelry and her trinkets.
Suddenly, in the middle of more details, he had turned and rushed blindly away. It was not so much grief as a sort of horror at himself that drove him; he felt as if someone had forced him to look on a past folly—a folly of which he was now ashamed.
He had thought of Christine with a sort of passionate thankfulness and gratitude; and now there was nothing but dislike and contempt for him in her brown eyes. Somehow she seemed like a different woman to the one whom he had so lightly wooed and won such a little while ago. She looked older—wiser; the childishness of her face seemed to have hardened; it was no longer the little girl Christine who faced him in the silent room.
He broke out again urgently:
"Don't be absurd, Christine. I won't have it, I tell you, I forbid you to leave the hotel. After all, you're my wife—you must do as I wish." She seemed not to hear him; she stood with her eyes fixed straight in front of her.