Still leaning on the chair for support, and without lifting her bowed head, or raising her downcast eyes, she said in a voice barely articulate with the huskiness and tremor of threatened physical collapse, “Please leave me for awhile. Providence has seen fit to afflict me so sorely that I must beg a little time to try to think. But, stay!” And her voice gathered a little strength in an effort to keep from breaking down altogether:
“I desire to receive nothing from John. I shall not reply to his complaint, and you will return the money he has placed to my credit in the bank. Now, please leave me; I desire to be alone.”
During his professional experience, the “Judge” had been a witness to many painful scenes, and familiarity had calloused somewhat his sense of sympathy. But as he gazed upon the white, spiritually chaste face of this frail woman, a conviction that a great wrong was being done to her forced and crowded itself upon his brain.
“Someone must answer for it before a higher than human court,” he thought, and then with bent head he left her, feeling that he would value beyond price the power to effect a little gleam of sunshine to heal her broken heart.
“Dorothy! Dorothy!” he muttered, and he passed out from her presence with words of Tennyson on his lips:
“Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand,
The sound of a voice that is still!”
After he had gone, Constance remained motionless. She was strangely quiet, yet wrapt in thoughts of bitterest shame and grief, the world had little left for her to care for.
A sense of gloom enveloped her. Its shadow bore heavily upon her oppressed spirits, smothering by its weight the stifled cry of her heart’s anguish.
It was therefore with a wondrously calm voice, pregnant with tragic pathos, that she at length broke the stillness: “I am sure of the cause of John’s absence now, and the very worst has come to me. What now can compensate me for the humiliation of being thought by him so shameless and debased? Oh, how wretched I am!” and with a moan, she placed her hand on the top of her head.
“Oh, heaven spare my reason—yet—what is reason to me now? Or—life? My darling is drowned. John has left me, and with them hope and happiness are gone forever.”