Book 2 The Land of Mockery Chapter 27

"Gone!" he said mechanically. "Thelma--my wife gone! Why should she go?"

And he stared fixedly at Neville, who laid one hand soothingly on his arm.

"Perhaps she is with friends," he suggested. "She may be at Lady Winsleigh's or Mrs. Lorimer's."

"No, no!" interrupted Morris. "Britta, who stayed up all night for her, has since been to every house that my lady visits and no one has seen or heard of her!"

"Where is Britta?" demanded Philip suddenly.

"She has gone again to Lady Winsleigh's," answered Morris, "she says it is there that mischief has been done,--I don't know what she means!"

Philip shook off his secretary's sympathetic touch, and strode through the rooms to Thelma's boudoir. He put aside the velvet curtains of the portiere with a noiseless hand--somehow he felt as if, in spite of all he had just heard, she must be there as usual to welcome him with that serene sweet smile which was the sunshine of his life. The empty desolate air of the room smote him with a sense of bitter pain,--only the plaintive warble of her pet thrush, who was singing to himself most mournfully in his gilded cage, broke the heavy silence. He looked about him vacantly. All sorts of dark forebodings crowded on his mind,--she must have met with some accident, he thought with a shudder,--for that she would depart from him in this sudden way of her own accord for no reason whatsoever seemed to him incredible--impossible.