The colonel looked puzzled. ‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘if I fail to see why you have thought it needful to tell me to-day that which I did not wish or ask to be enlightened about yesterday.’
‘I have told you this to-day because yesterday, a little while after you left me, I saw—my husband.’
‘Your husband!—But how’—— He stared at her as though he could not say another word. Mora was now the calmer of the two.
‘The letter which I received five years ago informing me of his death was sent to me in error. Another man bearing the same name as my husband—a déporté like him, had died; and somehow one convict would seem to have been mistaken for the other.’
‘O Mora, Mora, and am I then to lose you!’ cried the colonel.
She did not speak; but at that moment all the anguish of her soul was revealed in her eyes.
Involuntarily he moved from the place where he had been standing and sat down by her side.
‘And I love you so dearly!—so dearly!’
‘And I you!’ she answered scarcely above a whisper. ‘I may tell you this now—for the last time.’
Their hands sought each other, touched and clasped. In the silence that ensued, the leaves seemed whispering among themselves of that which they had just heard; while the stream went frothing and fuming on its way like some wordy egotist who cares for nothing save his own ceaseless babble.