“Then what is your opinion?”
“At present I have none. I can have none until I make a thorough examination. There are certainly no outward marks of violence.”
“We need not inform the police, I suppose?”
“Not at present,” he replied, his eyes still fixed upon the blanched face of the woman who had once been all the world to me.
I raised her dead hand, and upon it imprinted a last fervent kiss. It was cold and clammy to my lips. In that hour all my old love for her had returned, and my heart had become filled with an intense bitterness and desolation. I had thought that all my love for her was dead, and that Edith Austin, the calm, sweet woman far away in an English county, who wrote to me daily from her quiet home deep in the woodlands, had taken her place. But our meeting and its tragic sequel had, I admit, aroused within me a deep sympathy, which had, within an hour, developed into that great and tender love of old. With men this return to the old love is of no infrequent occurrence, but with women it seldom happens. Perhaps this is because man is more fickle and more easily influenced by woman’s voice, woman’s glances, and woman’s tears.
The reader will probably accuse me of injustice and of fickleness of heart. Well, I cannot deny it; indeed, I seek to deny nothing in this narrative of strange facts and diplomatic wiles, but would only ask of those who read to withhold their verdict until they have ascertained the truth yet to be revealed, and have read to the conclusion, this strange chapter of the secret history of a nation.
My friend the doctor was holding one hand, while I imprinted a last kiss upon the other. A lump was in my throat, my eyes were filled with tears, my thoughts were all of the past, my anguish of heart unspeakable. That small chill hand with the cold, glittering ring—one that I had given her in Brussels long ago—seemed to be the only reality in all that hideous phantasmagoria of events.
“Do not despair,” murmured the kind voice of my old friend, standing opposite me on the other side of the bed. “You loved her once, but it is all over—surely it is!”
“No, Dick!” I answered brokenly. “I thought I did not love her. I have held her from me these three years—until now.”
“Ah!” he sighed, “I understand. Man always longs for the unattainable.”