Blaine did not reply. He knew that on the day following the discovery of the murdered man, one Franchette Durand, otherwise Fifine Déchaussée, had sailed for Havre on the ill-fated La Tourette, which had gone to the bottom in mid-ocean, with all on board. He knew also that an hour before the French girl’s last tragic interview with Paddington, she had discovered the existence of his wife, for he himself had seen to it that the knowledge was imparted to her. Further than that, he preferred not to conjecture. The Madonna-faced girl had taken her secret with her to her swiftly retributive grave in the deep.
Blaine rose, somewhat reluctantly. Work called him, and yet he loved to be near them in the rose-tinted high noon of their happiness.
“I’ll be on hand to-morrow, indeed I will!” he promised heartily, in response to their eager request.
“To-morrow! Just think!” Anita buried her glowing face in her lover’s shoulder for an instant, and then looked up with misty eyes. “Just think, if it hadn’t been for you, Mr. Blaine, there wouldn’t be any to-morrow! I don’t mean about your getting my father’s money all back for me––I’m grateful, of course, but it doesn’t count beside the greater thing you 315 have given us! But for you, there would never have been any––to-morrow.”
“That’s true!” The young man’s arm encircled the girl’s slender waist as they stood together in the glowing sunlight, but his other hand gripped the detective’s. “We owe life, our happiness, the future, everything to you!”
And so Henry Blaine left them.
At the door he turned and glanced back, and the sight his eyes beheld was a goodly one for him to carry away with him into the world––a sight as old as the ages, as new as the hour, as prescient as the hours and ages to come. Just a man and a maid, sunshine and happiness, youth and love!––that, and the light of undying gratitude in the eyes they bent upon him.
