Still with that strained look, intense and far off as that of a sleepwalker, still with face deathlike in its rigid whiteness, she moved across the room. The loose shower of hair seemed to annoy her by its weight. She paused an instant before the table and took up a curious-looking silver dagger. Then, hastily twisting the hair into a thick coil, she fastened it with the dagger and turned toward the door.
“Will she read it?” muttered Lord Francis to himself, as he looked at the closely-covered pages of the letter in his hand. “Oh, if she would only believe, if she would only let me know what she really feels. It is maddening to be placed in such a position, to see her playing fast and loose with reputation, to have no more right to kiss her lips or touch her hand than the veriest stranger. To be here now, to-night, the same roof covering us, not half a dozen walls dividing us, and yet not dare——”
He broke off abruptly, his eyes grew dark with stormy passions. The pain and fever of aroused memories throbbed wildly in his heart, and thrilled his veins anew with love and longing, as once her light step and sweet low laugh had thrilled him.
“Fenella! wife!” his heart cried. “O God! are our lives to be forever wrecked and spoiled by this miserable folly? Child, surely you know I love you, that all other women are but as shadows to me. Oh, how my heart aches for you! Surely you feel it—you can’t have forgotten—you can’t!”
He looked again at the letter, then placed it in an envelope and sealed it hastily.
“I will go to her—I know her room. I can slip it under the door if—if she is asleep; but, perhaps——”
He did not finish that thought audibly. Only opened the door and looked down the dark and silent corridor beyond.
How still it was. He heard a clock striking, somewhere in the silence, two hours after midnight. A strange chill—a feeling of half shame, half uncertainty—held him there on the threshold. There seemed something guilty and wrong about the simple action he intended.
“To think,” he muttered to himself, “that a man should actually feel there was something improper in leaving a letter at his own wife’s door. Yet, if I were seen, who would believe it?”