“Ask your Uncle Robert, dear?” she whispered.  Her eyes looked into his with longing, with renunciation.  A certain peace stole into them and slowly the eyelids closed.

Frank, who had half grasped the meaning of her words, leaned forward fearfully.  The hand which held his seemed colder, more listless.  There was something different.  Something that he could not name—­that frightened him.

Suddenly he realized its meaning.  The heart which had pulsed beneath his fingers was still.

CHAPTER LXXXI

READJUSTMENT

Of the trip to Berkeley which followed, Frank could not afterward recall the slightest detail.  Between the time when, like a madman, he had tried to rouse his sweetheart from that final lethargy which knew no waking, and the moment when he burst upon his Uncle Robert with what must have seemed an insane question, Frank lost count of time.

He was in the library of an Alameda county lawyer, host of the Stanley and the Windham families.  Across the mahogany table, grasping the back of a chair for support, one hand half outstretched in a supplicating gesture, stood his Uncle Robert—­pale, shaken ghost of the self-possessed man that he usually was.  Between them, imminent with subtle violence, was the echo of Frank’s question, hurled, like an explosive missile at the elder man: 

“Why did Bertha Larned kill herself?”

After an interval of silence Windham pulled himself together; looked about him hastily ere he spoke.  “Hush!  Not here!  Not now!” The eyes which sought Frank’s were brilliant with suffering.  “Is she—­dead?”

The young man nodded dumbly.  Something like a sob escaped the elder.  He was first to speak.  “Come.  We must get out of here.  We must have a talk.”  He opened the door and went out, Frank following.  In the street, which sloped sharply downward from a major elevation, they could see the bay of San Francisco, the rising smoke cloud on the farther shore.  They walked together upward, away from the houses, toward a grove of eucalyptus trees.  Here Robert halted and sat down.  He seemed utterly weary.  Frank stood looking down across the valley.

“Bertha Larned was my daughter,” said his uncle almost fiercely.

Frank did not turn nor start as Windham had expected.  One might have thought he did not hear.  At length, however, he said slowly, “I suspected that—­a little.  But I want to know.”

“I—­can’t tell you more,” said the other brokenly.

“Who—­who was her mother, Uncle Bob?”

“If you love her, Frank, don’t ask that question.”

The young man snapped a dry twig from a tree and broke it with a sort of silent concentration into half a dozen bits.  “Then—­it’s true ... the tale heard round town!  That you and—­”

“Yes, yes,” Windham interrupted, “Frank, it’s true.”

“The—­procuress?”