"I am afraid you will think me intrusive," was Edith's hesitating greeting to Helen, "but I could not help coming. I thought you might feel lonely."
Helen looked at her for a moment with wistful eyes and trembling lips: then she crossed swiftly to where her friend stood and kissed her. And never could these two be so wholly separated or estranged again as to efface the memory of all the meaning that this caress conveyed. The word which Edith had used had been most happily chosen. Her woman's instinct divined the loneliness which overwhelmed the widow, and this proof of her sympathy was the passport to Mrs. Greyson's heart. Loneliness was the feeling of which Helen was most of all conscious. The death of even an indifferent acquaintance often may seem to desolate the earth from its simple irremediableness, and much more does the removal of one near to us make the world appear half a void.
Helen had been sitting alone before Edith came, reviewing her past and drearily speculating of her future. She went over the days of her wedded life; her innocent, introspective childhood, in which she had dreamed and read, dwelling in a world apart; alone but for the ideal creations of her books or her own quick fancy. She had married knowing as little of life or of love, as when, a lonely child, she had spelled out the tale of Prince Camaralzaman, and wondered what the divine passion really was, or if indeed it had existence, outside of fairy lore.
The torch of death throws its glare backward, and its funeral light showed many a past long since forgotten, but now revealed with new and distorting vividness. Helen remembered the baby which had lived but long enough to open its eyes with a smile that seemed of recognition, and then faded back into the unknown whence it had come. A throb of tenderness for the dead father moved the mother's heart as she thought of her baby, so little time hers, and so long asleep under the marguerites of a grave over the sea. She had suffered much from the selfishness, the dominant self-will, the distorted views of life of Dr. Ashton; and these things she even now could not forget; but, too, she thought of him as the father of her child, her baby ever dear and living in memory.
She reflected, too, of the men she had known, and especially of Arthur Fenton. Her nature had need of some one upon whom to expend its treasures, and she realized that had she not felt in the artist a certain insincerity, he might have awakened her love. He had been appreciative, sympathetic, brilliant; and, too, he had called largely upon her patience and forbearance, than which there is no surer way to win a generous woman's affection. Yet always some note rang false to her fine ear, and to the weakness of his nature she had never been wholly blind, although not until his marriage had given him a certain distance had she realized how deep and unsparing her knowledge of him really was.
Of Grant Herman she would not think. Thoughts of him arose again and again in her mind, but she resolutely put them down. Some secret stir of mingled pain and joy told her too well that the sculptor had awakened the first love of her life. But at least with her husband, however unloved, lying yet unburied, she would not dwell upon the passion of another.
She took Edith's hand, and the two women sat down side by side, shedding tears together, rather from a sense of the general woe and bitterness of life than for poignant grief for the present calamity. It was not much they said at first. Neither was of the talkative order of women, finding comfort in the mere utterance of words. They grew together, sustained by giving and receiving tenderness, and each tacitly asking and according forgiveness for unfriendly feelings in the past. It is probable, too, that Edith, heavy with the disappointments of her married life, found relief in being able to weep unrestrainedly, even though the true source of her tears was not the obvious one.
"I never loved him," Helen said of her husband. "After we separated we became friends, rather because of a common past when we were both strangers here, than from any fitness for each other. But he was once my husband."
Her friend pressed her hand in silence.
"We had a child," Helen spoke again; "a little daughter. She only lived one day. If she had not gone it might have been different. At least we should have kept on together. My poor little baby!"