She must have forgotten to have it taken off, for of course with the man, she hated the name, and had undoubtedly resumed her maiden one after procuring her divorce, to which she was entitled by my desertion.
How strange it was to be gripping that little bag again; how different the conditions now from the time when I purchased it; then my cup of bliss seemed full and running over, with a charming wife and a grand fortune all in one year; now it was filled, but, alas! with gall and wormwood, my hopes lying cold in ashes, my feeling toward the world one of suspicion and disgust.
There was at least a singular satisfaction in the fact that while we fled to the uttermost parts of the earth to avoid each other fate had brought us face to face in this old city that I had never heard of two months before.
What did it all mean?
I dared not allow myself to hope there could be the faintest chance of a reconciliation. She hated me—had she not just said so?—even as I now loathed myself forever giving up such a charming being.
Perhaps it was intended that our dead romance was to be finally buried with a fanfare of trumpets and some tragedy; perhaps ere the end came she was to discover how terribly she had misjudged me in the past, when she was wont to taunt me upon my lack of heroic qualities.
Robbins had some few words with the girl, and then Carmencita, giving one earnest look at the lady whom she adored, led the way.
After Robbins came Hildegarde, while I, like a dutiful follower, brought up the rear, grasping in my hand the little bag that held her trinkets, her jewelry, and the picture which she had seriously objected to my seeing—the picture of a man who had perhaps crept into the heart I had basely deserted, and was now enshrined there as her hero, a position I had never been able to obtain in those days of old when, as I have said, she deigned to allow me to call her “my Hildegarde.”
CHAPTER VI.
A BAD BLUNDER.