Suddenly he laid the photograph down, took
with trembling fingers a letter-case from his pocket, opened it, and
laid his last letter to her, indorsed with the cruel announcement of her
death, before him on the table. He passed his hand across his forehead
and opened the letter. It was dated 1856! The photograph must have been
taken two years AFTER her alleged death!
He examined it again eagerly, fixedly, tremblingly. A wild impulse to
summon Barker or Stacy on the spot was restrained with difficulty and
only when he remembered that they could not help him. Then he began to
oscillate between a joy and a new fear, which now, for the first time,
began to dawn upon him. If the news of her death had been a fiendish
trick of her relations, why had SHE never sought him? It was not ill
health, restraint, nor fear; there was nothing but happiness and
the strength of youth and beauty in that face and figure. HE had not
disappeared from the world; he was known of men; more, his memorable
good fortune must have reached her ears. Had he wasted all these
miserable years to find himself abandoned, forgotten, perhaps even
a dupe? For the first time the sting of jealousy entered his soul.
Perhaps, unconsciously to himself, his strange and varying feelings that
afternoon had been the gathering climax of his mental condition; at all
events, in the sudden revulsion there was a shaking off of his apathetic
thought; there was activity, even if it was the activity of pain.
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