“I don't know.”
“Where is he?”
She looked at him piteously without speaking.
Atherton stepped to his door, and gave the order forgotten before. Then he closed the door, and came back to Marcia. “Don't you know where your husband is, Mrs. Hubbard?”
“Oh, he will come back! He couldn't leave me! He's dead,—I know he's dead; but he will come back! He only went away for the night, and something must have happened to him.”
The whole tragedy of her life for the past fortnight was expressed in these wild and inconsistent words; she had not been able to reason beyond the pathetic absurdities which they involved; they had the effect of assertions confirmed in the belief by incessant repetition, and doubtless she had said them to herself a thousand times. Atherton read in them, not only the confession of her despair, but a prayer for mercy, which it would have been inhuman to deny, and for the present he left her to such refuge from herself as she had found in them. He said, quietly, “You had better give me that paper, Mrs. Hubbard,” and took the bill from her. “If the others come with their accounts again, you must send them to me. When did you say Mr. Hubbard left home?”
“The night after the election,” said Marcia.
“And he didn't say how long he should be gone?” pursued the lawyer, in the feint that she had known he was going.
“No,” she answered.
“He took some things with him?”