My
knowledge of your long unhappiness alone gives me courage to
speak."
Alaire raised her fluttering fingers to her throat; her eyes were
wide as she said: "You don't mean--Mr. Austin?"
"Yes." Longorio scrutinized her closely, as if to measure the
effect of his disclosure. "Senora, you are free!"
Alaire uttered a breathless exclamation; then, feeling his gaze
burning into her, turned away, but not before he had noted her
sudden pallor, the blanching of her lips.
This unexpected announcement dazed her; it scattered her thoughts
and robbed her of words, but just what her dominant emotion was at
the moment she could not tell. Once her first giddiness had
passed, however, once the truth had borne in upon her, she found
that she felt no keen anguish, and certainly no impulse to weep.
Rather she experienced a vague horror, such as the death of an
acquaintance or of a familiar relative might evoke. Ed had been
anything but a true husband, and her feeling now was more for the
memory of the man he had been, for the boy she had known and
loved, than for the man whose name she bore. So he was gone and,
as Longorio said, she was free. It meant much.
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