“For you—for you—You look back on a paradise, and I on—”
“Oh, Una—but it’s all over, you have all your life left!”
“I have—I have!” cried Una, lifting her face from Amethyst’s shoulder, “I would not have that past again, not the maddest moment of it! I will live—I will be good for something in spite of it. Oh—I should like to give my life to telling girls that one can be different. I think I’d die to keep another child from my fate! But it has been—and alas and alas, it will be!”
This was the wrong that Tony had done her.
She had saved her soul alive, but the first spring of her heart was gone for ever, and if a second came, it might not be till the chances of life were over for her.
She threw herself on her knees when Amethyst left her.
“Oh, God!” she whispered, “let me not look back—let me look forward up, up to Thee!”
There was a great outcry, when Wilfred stirred up his sisters to go back with him on the next day to Nice. The girls were angry, and declared that Una was a heartless flirt and had led him on; but Wilfred would not hear a reproach cast at her, and went up to the Leighs’ villa to bid Lucian farewell, and to tell his story.
It was a bad day with Lucian, indeed each day began to show failing strength, and the shadow lay so heavily on all around him, that it was no wonder that Wilfred Jackson’s affairs had never been guessed at. Lucian could not talk to him, but lay and listened while Sylvester put in occasional questions, and shortened the interview as much as possible. Then it came over Wilfred, that he was bidding his friend farewell for the last time, and he felt how much he had let himself be diverted from his state by a new interest. He muttered something, he hardly knew what, as he squeezed Lucian’s hand, but it ended in “never forgetting the Rockies.”
“All right,” said Lucian, “and don’t forget either that—I said—that I hoped, when you’re dying, you may thank God for your love, as I do—though we’ve neither of us been lucky.”