"I'm so sorry," he said formally and constrainedly.
"I don't suppose it's very serious," she said. "But I must go, of course." She went on under the cover of Fanny's gentle music. "It's all rather odd though--its coming to-night and its happening at the Mildmays'. I forgot, though, you don't know why I feel that so odd. How Lady Mildmay'll nurse him! I expect I shall have a struggle to get him out of the house and home again."
Marchmont made no answer but stood looking down on her face. She met his glance fairly, and knew what it was that had forced itself into his mind and now found expression in his eyes. She had declared to him that her fate was irrevocable, that the lines of her life were set, that nothing but death could alter them, and that death had no part in her thoughts about her husband. The telegram did not prove her wrong; yet seizure was a vague word under which much might lie hidden. But her mood and her feeling still remained; it was not in hope or in any attempt at self-consolation, but in the expression of an obstinate conviction which dominated her mind that she said in answer to Marchmont's glance, "I can't believe it's anything really amiss. I expect I shall find him at work again when I get back to-morrow."
With a little movement of his hands Marchmont turned away. He had at command no conventional phrases in which to express a desire that she might prove right. It was impossible to say that he wished she might prove wrong; even in his own mind a man leaves a hope like that vague and unformulated. But he marvelled, still without understanding, at the strange obstinate idea which seemed almost to exalt Quisanté above the ordinary lot of mortals, to see in him a force so living that it could not perish, a vitality so intense that death could lay no hand on it. He glanced at her as he crossed the room to the piano; she sat now with the telegram in her hands and her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her. It needed a sharper summons, a nearer reality, to rouse her from the conviction that her life was bound for ever to that of the man whom she had chosen and for whom she had given so much. It would all go on, right to the end of everything. The telegram had not shaken that faith in her, nor altered that despair.