“No! But I have thought it out for all that, and——” She paused and pressed her hands to her head. Jacynth gently led her to a seat. She looked exhausted. “He left me,” said she presently—“to find my child and bring him to me. He came back, and there was no child with him. I was ill then—very ill. I could not think, but for all that, I knew. Then he went away again, and I waited—waited. Great Heaven!” said she, clasping her hands, “if you only knew what it was to wait like that for a sight of your child! and then there came—that!” She pointed to the telegram that he still held. “Well, what do you think?” asked she in a low voice, bending forward.
“It is hard to think——”
“No, it is not!” He was horrified by the change in her tone, and looked at her. She was still bending forward, her hands clasped, her young, sweet face as hard as misery could make it. “It is the easiest thing,” she said. “He met her again, I suppose—I think, and together they have gone away, taking my child with them. Oh!” She sprang to her feet, and flung out her arms. “Oh! the child! He might have gone—gone forever. It would be hard, for I loved him; but to take the child from me! The child! My darling! My baby! Do you know how many months I have lived without my little sweetheart? You, you of all men know!” She turned to him, and caught him by the arm. “Ever since that awful trial! I gave him up then, my little one; and for what?” she almost hissed out the words—“to shield his father!”
“You mean——” said Jacynth, his heart beating; was he now to hear the truth from her own lips? But the sound of his voice broke in upon her passion, and checked her.
“Nothing,” said she quickly, “except that—that he is false to me.”
“I tell you again not to dwell too much on that,” said Jacynth slowly. Although his whole life seemed to depend upon it, he could not refrain from pleading his rival’s cause. “You have only that woman’s word for it. This telegram may be a fabrication from beginning to end.”
“A curiously well-timed one,” she laughed, in a cruelly miserable way. “If she knew nothing of him, how did she learn that my child and my husband were now away from me?”
“More curious things have been explained,” said he.
“You! you talk to me like this?” cried she passionately. “You would defend him! You! who knew he was once untrue? You”—faintly—“who once loved me?”
“I shall be your friend always,” said he, putting a great constraint upon himself. “It is because I am your friend that I speak thus; why not look at it in another light? You say your husband left you hurriedly; you say that Mme. de Vigny must have known of his absence from you, and also of your boy’s. It might be that she, out of revenge, stole the boy, and that your husband is now pursuing her with a view of restoring him to you.”