Page:Hornung - Rogues March.djvu/390

370 sweet stars her voice went up in broken and involuntary utterance of her soul’s pain.

“Oh, Tom,” it cried, “if you had died then it would be better now! I should be dead too. We should both be at peace. Oh, Tom, we might be together now!”

The hotel garden lay very still below. It was the back of the house, and now the hour was late. Suddenly there was a movement on the gravel underneath.

“Claire —is it your voice?”

His whispered—it was Tom.

“Yes,” she said at last. “Come up. I want to speak to you.”

“Now?”

“Yes! how is it you are still in the town?”

“I lost something. I have been hunting for it on the beach. I came back to have another look here.”

“I have it. Come straight up to the room you were in this afternoon.”

He appeared to hesitate.

“You —you are not alone?”

But Claire had left the window, and was waiting impatiently at the open door. How long he kept her! It seemed an age before his halting step was heard upon the stairs, while she, on fire to crave his forgiveness, and mindful of nothing else, could not imagine what held him back. Even when he came his eye was timid and his feet slow to cross the threshold: in fact, the inveterate conventionality of the male was not a little fluttered at her receiving him alone, at this hour of the night, and that night her marriage eve. Yet his qualms were entirely on her account. Nor could they quench the inextinguishable love-light in his honest eyes.

As for Claire, however, she forgot everything but the