"No, no!" said Pauline, starting up, "if I go it must be alone. But why should I go?"
She looked piteously from one to the other. "What good can I or anyone do to him if he is dying? Perhaps there is some mistake."
Antoine spoke in voluble French in accompaniment to Poussette's gestures, and at the words she drooped appallingly.
"Come, Pauline, perhaps it will not be so terrible after all. You were going to visit him this week anyway."
"I know, I know, but this is different, dreadful, startling. It makes me so—I cannot describe. Who is with him? Only Mlle. Poussette! Oh, why—why? It will spoil my marriage, Sara; perhaps it will prevent my marriage!"
"Nothing of the kind! No, no. You will be married the sooner, I daresay. Where is Mr. Hawtree? Why don't he come up and talk to you?"
"He is being driven with Alexis Tremblay to the station! A train may pass through this morning."
Pauline now recollected that he had gone to Montreal to make final preparations for the wedding; among other things, the drawing up of an antiquated contract according to the mixed law of the Province. A sudden wish woke in her to run away and join him and so evade the painful scene which must ensue if she obeyed her brother's commands.
"Death's a dreadful thing anyway, I guess," remarked Miss Cordova to fill in the silence, touching Pauline's thick loops of hair as she spoke. "I just know how you feel."
"Mon Dieu—be quiet, Sara! It isn't his death I mind so much as his dying. Do you not see—he will make me promise, he will bother me into something; dying people always do—I can't explain. If he would just die and have done with it!"