I came slowly up the cliff again—cold, stunned. What had I done? Where should I go?
"Margaret! Margaret!" came a loud, terrified cry from the porch.
It was the voice of my sister Joyce.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
That night father was struck down with the stroke that was to end in his death.
That was what the terror in my sister's voice had meant when she had called down the garden to me through the chill darkness. Her cry had roughly summoned me from the contemplation of my own woes, and the mourning of my own cruelty, to a sterner death-bed than the death-bed of my own selfish hopes, to the darkest experience that can cross any loving human creature's path.
He lay ill three weeks, but from the first we knew that there was no hope, and knew that none could tell when he might finally be taken. We took turns night and day watching beside him, and during the first dreadful night following his seizure I was sitting alone in the dim parlor waiting for my turn, when, towards midnight, there was a knock at the door. I thought it was the doctor, who had promised to come again before morning; but when I opened the door the squire stood outside. The bad news had crept up to the Manor during the evening, and he had come to learn if it was true.
For the first time that evening a little breath of something that was warm crept about my cold heart. I forgot that the squire had wanted to marry me, and that I had practically refused him; I forgot everything but that here was a friend full of real sympathy in our trouble, and thinking at that moment of nothing else—perhaps the only friend whom I instinctively counted upon in a world that seemed to me just then very wide and empty.