“And did the lady, er——ah——did she reciprocate?” Johnny Pathmore ventured.
The Queen saw Francis nod as he solemnly replied.
“She loves me as I love her——this I know in all absoluteness.” He stood up suddenly. “Wait. I will show her to you.”
And as he started toward the door, the Queen, in roguishness of a very extreme of happiness at her husband’s confession she had overheard, fled trippingly to hide in the wide doorway of a grand room which the maid had informed her was the drawing room, whatever such room might be. Deliciously imagining Francis’ surprise at not finding her in bed, she watched him go up the wide marble staircase. In a few moments he descended. With a slight chill at the heart she observed that he betrayed no perturbation at not having found her. In his hand he carried a scroll or roll of thin, white cardboard. Looking neither to right nor left, he re-entered the library.
Peeping in, she saw him unroll the scroll, present it before Johnny Pathmore’s eyes, and heard him say:
“But why be so funereal about it, old man?” Johnny Pathmore queried, after a prolonged examination of the photograph.
“Because we met too late. I was compelled to marry another. And I left her forever just a few hours before she was to marry another, which marriage had been compelled before either of us ever knew the other existed. And the woman I married, please know, is a good and splendid woman. She will have my devotion forever. Unfortunately, she will never possess my heart.”
In a great instant of revulsion, the entire truth came to the Queen. Clutching at her heart with clasped hands, she nearly fainted of the vertigo that assailed her. Although they still talked inside the library, she heard no further word of their utterance as she strove with slow success to draw herself together. Finally, with indrawn shoulders, a little forlorn sort of a ghost of the resplendent woman and wife she had been but minutes before, she staggered across the hall and slowly, as if in a nightmare wherein speed never resides, dragged herself upstairs. In her room, she lost all control. Francis’ ring was torn from her finger and stamped upon. Her boudoir cap and her turtle-shell hairpins joined the general havoc under her feet. Convulsed, shuddering, muttering to herself in her extremity, she threw herself upon her bed and only managed, in an ecstasy of anguish, to remain perfectly quiet when Francis peeped in on his way to bed.