"Every thing," she said. He looked at her again uneasily, and seemed about to speak; then left the room. "I've killed her," he thought; "but words are mere insults now."
He was gone, and without one word of explanation. It was, then, no nightmare, to be dispelled by a change of posture. There was no awakening for her. It was all true!
XIII.
Mary was alone with the baby. Georgina's tiny hand was clasped around her mother's finger; rosy cheek and dewy lip invited many a loving maternal caress. At least here was love, without anxiety or heart-ache. "My love for this child, to whom I have given life, is faint in comparison to God's love for his creatures," she thought. "My soul shall rest on him, as Georgie rests in my arms. He knows the way out of this blackness. I will follow him trustfully."
The day was hard to bear; wife's work without wife's consolation. Sewing, sorting, packing, filled the hours too closely to leave much time for active grief. They were services that could easily have been performed by a servant; but Mary, amid the perplexity which clouded her life, kept one purpose clearly before her—to fulfil her duties thoroughly toward her husband, and even toward the unhappy woman who had poisoned her happiness, and thus prevent further entanglement.
The dinner hour, whose claims prevail over every other external circumstance in life, was lived through, thanks to the presence of Italian servants, who do not expect friends to look happy on the eve of separation, and are ready to melt into tears of sympathy at a moment's warning. Vane passed the evening in his study, transacting business with Mr. Holston and a lawyer; Mary in his dressing-room, attending to "last things."
At intervals through the weary night she heard him moving about in the library. About five o'clock, the peculiar click of the hall door told her that he had gone out. Then came two hours of sleep, and memory's dreadful reckoning when she awoke.
Breakfast was served at nine o'clock. After going through the dismal form which represents eating on such occasions, Nicholas went to the window to watch for the gondola. "Will you come here, Mary?" he said.
She went to him, and measured despairingly, as he talked to her, the gulf which separated them spiritually while they stood side by side.
After giving various directions as to material arrangements during his absence, he said, "I went to confession this morning, and to your Padre Giulio." She looked up eagerly into his sad face, stern with the rigidity of repressed emotion. "After confession, I saw him in his own room, and told him all the circumstances of the last three months, out of the confessional, in order that you may feel free to seek from him the advice and consolation I have shown myself unfit to give you."