"Miss Carvel!"
Slowly she raised her face to his, unbelief and wonder in her eyes, —unbelief and wonder and fright. No; it could not be he. But when she met the quality of his look, the grave tenderness of it, she trembled, and our rendered her own to the page where his handwriting quivered and became a blur.
He never knew the effort it cost her to rise and confront him. She herself had not measured or fathomed the power which his very person exhaled. It seemed to have come upon him suddenly. He needed not to have spoken for her to have felt that. What it was she could not tell. She knew alone that it was nigh irresistible, and she grasped the back of the chair as though material support might sustain her.
"Is he—dead?"
She was breathing hard.
"No," she said. "Not—not yet, They are waiting for the end."
"And you?" he asked in grave surprise, glancing at the door of the
Judge's room.
Then she remembered Clarence.
"I am waiting for my cousin," she said.
Even as she spoke she was with this man again at the Brinsmade gate. Those had been her very words! Intuition told her that he, too, was thinking of that time. Now he had found her at his desk, and, as if that were not humiliation enough, with one of his books taken down and laid open at his signature. Suffused, she groped for words to carry her on.