She rose and crossed the room to the fireplace, and glanced at herself in the glass. There was a dangerous light in her eyes. ‘If he does not speak to me, I shall strike him!’ she said to herself. Then aloud: ‘I have travelled six thousand miles in search of you, and now that I have found you, you have not even one kiss to greet me with! What a heart of marble yours must be!’
Still the impassive figure at the table made no more sign than if it had been carved in stone.
There was a pretty Venetian glass ornament on the chimney-piece. Mrs Boyd took it up and dashed it savagely on the hearth, where it was shattered to a hundred fragments. Then with white face and passion-charged eyes, she turned and faced her husband. ‘Oscar Boyd, why don’t you speak to your wife?’
‘Because I have nothing to say to her.’ He spoke as coldly and quietly as he might have spoken to the veriest stranger.
She controlled her passion with an effort. ‘Nothing to say to me! You can at least tell me something of your plans. Are we going to remain here, or are we going away, or what are we going to do?’
He began deliberately to fold the map he had been studying. ‘We shall start for London by the five o’clock train,’ he said. ‘At the terminus, we shall separate, to meet again to-morrow at my lawyer’s office. It will not take long to draw up a deed of settlement, by which a certain portion of my income will for the future be paid over to you. After that, we shall say farewell, and I shall never see you again.’
She stared at him with bewildered eyes. ‘Never see me again!’ she gasped out. ‘Me—your wife!’
‘Estelle—you know the reasons which induced me to vow that I would never regard you as my wife again. Those reasons have the same force now that they had a dozen years ago. We meet, only to part again a few hours hence.’
She had regained some portion of her sang-froid by this time. A shrill mocking laugh burst from her lips. It was not a pleasant laugh to hear. ‘During my husband’s absence, I must try to console myself with my husband’s money. You are a rich man, caro mio; you have made a large fortune abroad; and I shall demand to be treated as a rich man’s wife.’
‘You are mistaken,’ he answered, without the least trace of emotion in his manner or voice. ‘I am a very poor man. Nearly the whole of my fortune was lost by a bank failure a little while ago.’