“Monsieur is better, but much better,” he was cheerily assured.  “And for madame his wife he need have no inquietude.  She is safe and well, and only concerns herself for monsieur.”

This was reassuring, and Carey accepted it without comment or inquiry.  He knew that there was a misunderstanding somewhere, but he was still too exhausted to trouble himself about so slight a matter.  He thanked his kindly informant, and again he slept.

Two days later his interest in life revived.  He began to ask questions, and received from the doctor a full account of what had occurred.

He had been washed ashore, he was told—­he and madame his wife—­lashed fast together.  The ship had been wrecked within half a mile of the land.  But the seas had been terrific.  There had not been many survivors.

Carey digested the news in silence.  He had had no friends on board, having embarked only at Gibraltar.

At length he looked up with a faint smile at his faithful attendant.  “And where is—­madame?” he asked.

The little doctor hesitated, and spread out his hands deprecatingly.

“Oh, monsieur, I regret—­I much regret—­to have to inform you that she is already departed for Paris.  Her solicitude for you was great, was pathetic.  The first words she speak were:  ’My husband, do not let him know!’ as though she feared that you would be distressed for her.  And then she recover quick, quick, and say that she must go—­that monsieur when he know, will understand.  And so she depart early in the morning of yesterday while monsieur is still asleep.”

He was watching Carey with obvious anxiety as he ended, but the Englishman’s face expressed nothing but a somewhat elaborate indifference.

“I see,” he said, and relapsed into silence.

He made no further reference to the matter, and the doctor discreetly abstained from asking questions.  He presently showed him an English paper which contained the information that Mr. and Mrs. Carey were among the rescued.

“That,” he remarked, “will alleviate the anxiety of your friends.”

To which Carey responded, with a curt laugh:  “No one knew that we were on board.”

He left for Paris on the following day, allowing the doctor to infer that he was on his way to join his wife.

I

It was growing dark in the empty class-room, but there was nothing left to do, and the French mistress, sitting alone at her high desk, made no move to turn on the light.  All the lesson books were packed away out of sight.  There was not so much as a stray pencil trespassing upon that desert of orderliness.  Only the waste-paper basket, standing behind Mademoiselle Treves’s chair, gave evidence of the tempest of energy that had preceded this empty calm in the midst of which she sat alone.  It was crammed to overflowing with torn exercise books, and all manner of schoolgirls’ rubbish, and now and then it creaked eerily in the desolate silence as though at the touch of an invisible hand.