His back was to the door as she entered.
"I can not tell you how sorry I am," she began.
Bruce turned toward her his ghastly face, ravaged and deformed by
passion and sleeplessness, like a cane-brake in the Western Indies over
which a tornado has passed. He did not appear to notice her words or her
offered hand, but spoke in a strange, broken voice, after clearing his
parched throat once or twice, huskily:
"When did they go? At what hour?"
She told him as well as she could.
"Where have they gone to?"
"I have not the least idea. Bella gave no hint of this. Would you like
to see her note?" and she held it out to him.
The name appeared to sting him like the cut of a whip, for he started
convulsively as he took the scrap of paper. He read it through more than
once, as if unable to comprehend it; the power of discrimination seemed
blasted in his dry, red eyeballs; they could only glare.
He made it out at last, and crumpled it up in his hand, clenching it
till the knuckles became dead-white under the strain.
"We were to have been married this day month," he said to himself, in a
hoarse whisper; then raising his voice, "You can guess, at least, which
route they have taken?"
"Indeed I can not," she answered; "I would have done any thing to
prevent this; but you must see that pursuit now would be worse than
useless; it could only lead to fresh evils.
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