What was she? Really, what did he know of her accurately; when had he seen her obliged to face any crisis in her quiet life?
He rang violently, and when the man came in, asked:
“When did madame go out, did you tell me? Tell me again.”
“At five. Charles drove madame a little way on the Champs Elysées, and was then dismissed.”
She had been gone then five hours. There was no house of an intimate friend to which she could have gone for advice or even familiar confidence. She had no intimes, no enthusiasms; she lived, and he knew it, for him and her home absolutely. She had built a simple, healthful existence around him.
In this, his first solitude, his first long soliloquy, the state of Evremond’s mind altered as did his countenance. He grew stilled, almost appalled, at what might come to his knowledge now, at any moment, and facts magnified by his vivid imagination became ghosts to him—every one.
He went from the salon to her rooms—the pretty rooms of the woman of wealth and good taste, where every article of toilet and furniture spoke charmingly of the mistress. Mrs. Evremond’s dinner dress lay out on the bed; her maid stood in the window looking out. With a word about madame’s being very late to-night, she left the room discreetly.
Neither dressing table nor bureau nor secretary had any letter for him. There was no evidence of a hasty departure, no melodramatic chaos in the tranquil rooms that, with bright wood fires and shut-in invitingness, waited her return. She had gone out, as usual, but not as usual had she returned.
These rooms, to whose voices he had been for months deaf and indifferent, spoke to him now so insistingly that he turned away from them, not able to bear their appeal.
Back in the salon the clock marked the quarter after nine—at half-past he would go out to the prefecture of the police—and what then? Did this mean that he discarded the idea of a voluntary flight from him? No—she was, of course, safe. She had simply left him without a word or sign. He could do nothing—but suffer and wait.