Then I sprang to my feet and stared round the empty room as if seeking an explanation from it. It offered none. All round me was orderly, placid. Only within me burned a hell, lighted by those written words. It was very quiet, only an occasional drip of the June rain outside broke the stillness.
An exquisite picture of Viola laughed joyously back at me from a little table covered with vases of white flowers, white as she had been that first night at the studio....
O God in heaven, what _had_ I done to bring this ruin into my own life? _Had_ I deserved it? Had I? I thought wildly.
What had I done? What did it all mean? Veronica? A few kisses? the impulse of passion? It was nothing, everything was nothing to me beside Viola. She must have known that. Then I recalled her appeals to me. She had asked me to give up Veronica, why had I not done so? Instead, how had I met Viola; how had I answered her? My own words were hurled back upon me by memory and fell upon me like blows, so had they fallen upon her. How could I have been so mad, so blind?
Her favourite chair was pushed a little from the fire; by its side I noticed something white, and stooped mechanically to pick it up. It was her handkerchief, crushed together and soaked through and through. How she must have been crying to wet it like that! At the corner it was marked with blood, as if she had pressed it to bitten lips.
My own eyes filled with scorching tears as I looked at it.
It was the one sign of the passion and agony that had raged in that room before I came back.
If I had only returned sooner! I put the handkerchief in my breast, and took up her letter again. Could I do anything, anything now to follow, to recall her?
I looked at the clock, and ice seemed to close round my heart and chill it. It was already eleven. Then the phrase about the other room struck me. Could she have possibly returned? I opened the door and went upstairs and through all the rooms in the house. All were empty. I saw the bedroom farthest from mine had been put ready for occupancy, and some few trifles of her own taken from our room and put into it. Then I came back, sick with apprehension, to the drawing-room again, questioning what I could do.