It was not at all what he could have believed
beforehand, that when he met Josephine they would talk with perfect
contentment of the affairs of the passing hour; and yet so it was.
With graver faces they talked of the dying woman, with whom Josephine
had passed the night. It was not a case in which death was sad; it was
life, not death, that was sad for the wandering brain. But Josephine
could tell how in those last nights the poor mother had found peace in
the presence of her supposed child.
"She curls my hair round her thin fingers and seems so happy," said
Josephine.
She did not say that the thin hands had fingered her wedding-ring; but
Caius thought of it, and that brought him back the remembrance of
something that had to be said that must be said then, or every moment
would become a sin of weak delay.
"I want to tell you," he began--"I know I must tell you--I don't know
exactly why, but I must--I am sorry to say anything to remind you--to
distress you--but I hated Le Maitre! Looking back, it seems to me that
the only reason I did not kill him was that I was too much of a coward."
Josephine looked off upon the sea. The wearied pained look that she used
to wear when the people were ill about her, or that she had worn when
she heard Le Maitre was returning, came back to her face, so that she
seemed not at all the girl who had been laughing with him a minute
before, but a saint, whose image he could have worshipped.
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