It was a curiously auspicious moment. Jack went over to him. "I wonder," he began, with a marked persuasiveness in his tone, "if you would like to have Sylvie Barry come over? She and your sister used to be such friends. And, in times like these, animosities and foolish prejudices ought to die out."
Fred gave him a startled look, and half turned, his lids drooping to veil the secret in his eyes. Jack waited with breath that half strangled him. He had marvelled how these two souls were to be brought into friendly contact again; how Sylvie was to have an opportunity of knowing that Fred was redeeming the manliness of manhood, instead of grounding among its trivial shoals, and, if she ever had cared for him, to understand that he was not utterly unworthy. He had spoken—what if the chance should fail!
Fred very naturally misinterpreted the emotion. Jack offered this out of the boundless tenderness of his heart, so confident was he of Sylvie's regard.
"You think—she would come?"
His own voice, under the great stress, sounded miles away to him, quite as if some other person had spoken.
How often the tense strain of feeling is relieved by a tone or an incident quite out of the magnetic current!
"Some one ought to drop in occasionally, for your mother's sake," said Dr. Maverick. "We shall have her in a fever from sympathy," putting the fact more delicately in words than it was in his thought.
"She would be glad to come, I know. She would feel hurt if— You empower me to ask her?" with an abrupt transition of tone.
Fred Lawrence bowed his head. He could not trust his voice.
The sick girl started, opened wide her eyes, threw up her arms, and began in weird, passionate tones, as if it were a stage declamation. Oh the lurid thought that seemed to travel from regions of bliss to the nethermost hell; to display a boundless capacity for enjoyment, for pleasure or pain, for tenderness and bitter, brilliant satire, a keen knowledge of the world to the very dregs,—the dust and ashes! She implored her lost idols to come near, and in the next breath she tossed them from her with a mocking laugh. She had no faith in God or man, and before her was a blank wall of despair.