“To see the Emperor?” I asked eagerly. “To tell him the truth—eh?”
Her white lips were compressed. She only drew a long, deep breath.
“Dick has gone,” she said at last, in a strange, dreamy voice. “And—and I must go back again to all the horrible dreariness and formality of the life to which, I suppose, I was born. Ah! Uncle Colin—I—I can’t tell you how I feel. My happiness is all at an end—for ever.”
“Come, come,” I said, placing my hand tenderly upon the girl’s shoulder. “You will go back to Petersburg—and you will learn to forget. We all of us have similar disappointments, similar sorrows. I, too, have had mine.”
But she only shook her head, bursting into tears as she slowly disengaged herself from me.
Then, with head sunk upon her chest in blank despair and sobbing bitterly, she turned from me, and in the clear, crimson afterglow, went slowly back up the garden-path to the house.
I stood gazing upon her slim, dejected figure until it was lost around the bend of the laurels. Then I retraced my steps towards the little lake-side village.
At ten o’clock that night, while writing a letter in the small hotel sitting-room, Richard Drury was shown in.
His face was paler than usual, hard and set.
He apologised for disturbing me at that hour, but I offered him a chair and handed him my cigarette-case. His boots were very dusty, I noticed; therefore I surmised that since leaving his well-beloved he had been tramping the roads.