The moment Colonel Woodruffe drew near Mora De Vigne, he saw that something was amiss. She looked an altogether different woman from her whom he had parted from only a few hours before with a tender light of love and happiness in her eyes. His heart misgave him as he walked up to her.
‘What has happened?’ he asked in anxious tones as he took her hand. ‘What has wrought this change in you? Your hand is like ice.’
She gazed up into his face for a moment or two without speaking, with a dumb, pitiful wistfulness in her eyes, that affected him strangely. Then she said: ‘Why did you not read the letter which I gave you last evening?’
He gazed at her for a moment. ‘You know my reasons for not reading it. But why do you ask that now?’
‘Because, if you had read it, you would have saved me from having to tell so much to-day, which, in that case, you would have known yesterday.’
‘Pardon me, but you speak in enigmas.’
‘You have read of earthquakes, although you may never have felt the shock of one. One minute all is fair, bright, and beautiful; the next, there is nothing but ruin, disaster, and death. Since I saw you yesterday, the foundations of my life, which I thought nothing could ever shake more, have crumbled into utter ruin around me.’
‘How can that be, while I am here to guard and cherish you? Yesterday, you gave me your love—your life. What power on earth can tear them from me?’
‘Ah me! Listen, and you shall learn.’
She sat for a few moments with bent head, as if scarcely knowing how to begin. The colonel was standing a little way from her, one of his arms twined round the slender stem of a sapling.