I felt myself growing paler and paler as I spoke, meeting her lovely, eager eyes fixed on mine.
"Destroyed?" she echoed, growing white to the lips. "Oh, Victor! How?"
"I would rather not say, Lucia, exactly how it occurred, but it had been accepted by a publisher here, and I was going to make one or two trifling alterations in it to please him, and so I had it back. Well, then, as I say, something happened, and the thing was destroyed."
There was a dead silence.
I saw her heart beating painfully beneath the laces on her bosom, and pain stamped on all her face. Then she said abruptly,—
"Have you Howard with you still?"
"No. He left Paris last night," I answered.
Her eyes met mine full across the sunlight. We looked at each other in silence.
She asked nothing farther.
I believe she comprehended the whole case as it stood, because she would know that had I lost or injured the MSS. myself I should have no reason for concealing it. As a matter of honourable feeling I wanted to keep the fact from her, but I could not help her guessing it. Curiously enough her next question, after a long pause—though I did not see that in her mind there could have been connection between the subjects—was: