Between eleven and twelve o’clock that night, Miss Gwilt, standing alone at the window which lit the corridor of the Sanitarium on the second floor, heard the roll of wheels coming toward her. The sound, gathering rapidly in volume through the silence of the lonely neighborhood, stopped at the iron gates. In another minute she saw the cab draw up beneath her, at the house door.
The earlier night had been cloudy, but the sky was clearing now and the moon was out. She opened the window to see and hear more clearly. By the light of the moon she saw Allan get out of the cab, and turn round to speak to some other person inside. The answering voice told her, before he appeared in his turn, that Armadale’s companion was her husband.
The same petrifying influence that had fallen on her at the interview with him of the previous day fell on her now. She stood by the window, white and still, and haggard and old—as she had stood when she first faced him in her widow’s weeds.
Mr. Bashwood, stealing up alone to the second floor to make his report, knew, the instant he set eyes on her, that the report was needless. “It’s not my fault,” was all he said, as she slowly turned her head and looked at him. “They met together, and there was no parting them.”
She drew a long breath, and motioned him to be silent. “Wait a little,” she said; “I know all about it.”
Turning from him at those words, she slowly paced the corridor to its furthest end; turned, and slowly came back to him with frowning brow and drooping head—with all the grace and beauty gone from her, but the inbred grace and beauty in the movement of her limbs.
“Do you wish to speak to me?” she asked; her mind far away from him, and her eyes looking at him vacantly as she put the question.
He roused his courage as he had never roused it in her presence yet.
“Don’t drive me to despair!” he cried, with a startling abruptness. “Don’t look at me in that way, now I have found it out!”
“What have you found out?” she asked, with a momentary surprise on her face, which faded from it again before he could gather breath enough to go on.