“We sail Monday on the St. Paul. Mizzi is with me. I broke my word to you. But you lied to me about the letters. I found them the week before the concert. I shall bring her back with me or stay to fight for Germany. Forgive me, dear sister.”
Just fifty words. His thrifty German training.
“No!” cried Fanny, aloud. “No! No!” And the cry quavered and died away, and another took its place, and it, too, gave way to another, so that she was moaning as she stood there with the telegram in her shaking hand. She read it again, her lips moving, as old people sometimes read. Then she began to whimper, with her closed fist over her mouth, her whole body shaking. All her fine courage gone now; all her rigid self-discipline; all her iron determination. She was not a tearful woman. And she had wept much on the train. So the thing that wrenched and shook her now was all the more horrible because of its soundlessness. She walked up and down the room, pushing her hair back from her forehead with the flat of her hand. From time to time she smoothed out the crumpled yellow slip of paper and read it again. Her mind, if you could have seen into it, would have presented a confused and motley picture. Something like this: But his concert engagements?... That was what had happened to Bauer.... How silly he had looked when her fist met his jaw.... It had turned cold; why didn't they have steam on? The middle of October.... Teddy, how could you do it! How could you do it!... Was he still lying in a heap on the floor? But of course the sneaking little Jap had found him.... Somebody to talk to. That was what she wanted. Some one to talk to....
Some one to talk to. She stood there, in the middle of her lamp-lighted living room, and she held out her hands in silent appeal. Some one to talk to. In her mind she went over the list of those whose lives had touched hers in the last few crowded years. Fenger, Fascinating Facts, Ella Monahan, Nathan Haynes; all the gay, careless men and women she had met from time to time through Fenger and Fascinating Facts. Not one of them could she turn to now.
Clarence Heyl. She breathed a sigh of relief. Clarence Heyl. He had helped her once, to-day. And now, for the second time, something that he had said long before came from its hiding place in her subconscious mind. She had said: