“You see,” he interrupted, “I wanted you to have something to remind—”
“Good-bye,” she repeated, smiling as she gave him her hand. “So you really go away to-morrow?”
“At once,” he said, gravely, as he pressed the hand she was now withdrawing from his own, and turned away.
She paused within the vestibuled entrance of the cathedral in what proved to be a vain endeavor to calm the turbulency of her feelings. The fingers of her gloved hand were still deadened by the pressure from which she had just released them. Her eyes had even mastered her will, and now sought with the intensity of eagerness, the dim outlines of a figure that was now lost amid the throng, now faintly visible, with its downcast head and slowly receding step. At last it vanished.
The unsteady, subdued, solemn tones of the great organ within again rolled tumultuously upon her. She stood struggling, as it were, with the overwhelming waves of sound. Both her eyes and memory seemed now to focus upon a receding past.
The dead face of her husband drifted from out the vacancy, so real that she started, stopped, then started again, slowly descending the steps.
She turned her face homeward. Unconscious of the tide of restless passers-by, and of the noise that roared imprisoned by the walls of the high buildings on either side of the street, she turned abstractedly from the square, lost in the depths of her meditations.
She was thinking of her husband. Thinking of a day on the race-course; the day upon which she had first met him. Of how she had then dreamed of his wonderful personality, and afterwards learned how easily and completely it had swayed her own. Of how untiring, faultlessly devotional had been his constant care for her, and of how precisely perfect and pleasureable had been their married life.
She grew desperate now, and upbraided herself distressingly to think that already he should have become to her “nothing more vital than a memory.”
Yes, after all, she would go. She would go to the scene where she had first met him, to San Francisco; her husband’s stable of horses was now there.