“Denis, you look tired. I was afraid something had happened.”
She had slipped her hand through his arm, and as they moved forward she glanced up at him, struck not so much by any new look in his face as by the fact that her approach had made no change in it.
“Papa?” She looked up in surprise. “He went to town yesterday. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course--I’d forgotten. You’re alone, then?” She dropped his arm and stood before him. He was very pale now, with the furrowed look of extreme physical weariness.
“Denis--are you ill? _Has_ anything happened?”
He forced a smile. “Yes--but you needn’t look so frightened.”
She drew a deep breath of reassurance. _He_ was safe, after all! And all else, for a moment, seemed to swing below the rim of her world.
“Your mother--?” she then said, with a fresh start of fear.
“It’s not my mother.” They had reached the terrace, and he moved toward the house. “Let us go indoors. There’s such a beastly glare out here.”
He seemed to find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where, after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly sorted heaps of wedding-cards.
“It’s about the woman,” he began abruptly--“the woman who pretended to be Arthur’s wife.”
Kate started as at the clutch of an unacknowledged fear.
Peyton made an impatient movement of negation. “If she was, why didn’t she prove it? She hadn’t a shred of evidence. The courts rejected her appeal.”
“Well, she’s dead.” He paused, and the next words came with difficulty. “She and the child.”
Kate started up and then sank down. These were not things about which young girls were told. The confused sense of horror had been nothing to this first sharp edge of fact.
“How do you know? My father said she had gone away--gone back to the West--”
“So we thought. But this morning we found her.”
He motioned toward the window. “Out there--in the lake.”
She drooped before him shudderingly, her eyes hidden, as though to exclude the vision. “She had drowned herself?”
They paused awhile, the minutes delving an abyss between them till he threw a few irrelevant words across the silence.