Claire had grown deathly pale as she finished the perusal of this note.
She had prepared herself for a night of wretched unrest, but here was a
dagger to murder sleep with even surer poignance.
It was past midnight when she heard Hollister go to his apartments. She
fancied that his step was a little unsteady. If this was true, no vinous
exhilaration made it so. An excitement of most opposite cause would have
explained the altered tread.
A saving hand had interposed between himself and ruin. The chance had
been given him of starting again--of meeting all the fiercest of his
creditors, and appeasing them. Instead of utter wreck, he had chiefly to
think of retrenchment. Perhaps what Claire believed unsteadiness in his
step was a brief pause near her own door. But even if an impulse to tell
her the good news may for a moment have risen uppermost, there must have
swept over him, promptly and sternly, the recollection of a dark and
sundering discovery.
Meanwhile Claire, wondering if the lost letter had, through any baleful
chance, drifted into his hands, lay pierced by that affrighted remorse
which a monition of detected guilt will bring the most hardened
criminal, and which of necessity strikes with acuter fang the soul of
one yet a neophyte in sin.