She looked at the girl, who was kneeling beside the sofa, rubbing her feet, and sometimes casting a glance round, in the quiet way of one well used to nursing, who can find out how the sufferer is without "fussing" with questions. She noticed, probably because she had seen little of her of late, a curious change in Elizabeth. It must have been gradual, but yet its result had never been so apparent before. Her brusqueness had softened down, and there had come into her and shone out of her, spite of all her natural uncomeliness of person, that beautiful, intangible something, common alike to peasant and queen, as clear to see and as sad to miss in both—womanliness. Added thereto was the gentle composure of mein which almost invariably accompanied it, which instinctively makes you fell that in great things or small, whatever the woman has to do, she will do it in the womanliest, wisest, and best way.
So thought Miss Hilary as she lay watching her servant, and then explained to her the errand upon which she wished to send her.
Not much explanation, for she merely gave her the advertisement to read, and told her what she wished done with it. And Elizabeth, on her part, asked no questions, but simply listened and obeyed.
After she was gone Hilary lay on the sofa, passive and motionless. Her strength and activity seemed to have collapsed at once into that heavy quietness which comes when one has endured to the utmost limit of endurance when one feels as if to speak a word or to lift a finger would be as much as life was worth.
"Oh, if I could only go to sleep!" was all she thought.
By-and-by sleep did come, and she was taken far away out of these miseries. By the strange peculiarity of dreams that we so seldom dream about any grief that oppresses us at the time but generally of something quite different, she thought she was in some known unknown land, lovely and beautiful, with blue hills rising in the distance, and blue seas creeping and curling on to the shore. On this shore she was walking with Robert Lyon, just as he used to be, with his true face and honest voice. He did not talk to her much; but she felt him there, and knew they had but "one heart between them." A heart which had never once swerved, either from the other; a heart whole and sound, into which the least unfaith had never come—that had never known, or recognized even as a possibility, the one first doubt, the ominous —
"Little rift within the lute,
That by-and-by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all."
Is it ever so in this world? Does God ever bring the faithful man to the faithful woman, and make them love one another with a righteous, holy, persistent tenderness, which dare look in His face, nor be ashamed; which sees in this life only the beginning of the life to come; and in the closest, most passionate human love something to be held with a loose hand, something frail as glass and brittle as straw, unless it is perfected and sanctified by the love divine?
Hilary at least believed so. And when at Elizabeth's knock she woke with a start, and saw—not the sweet sea-shore and Robert Lyon, but the dull parlor, and the last flicker of the fire, she thanked God that her dream was not all a dream—that, sharp as her misery was, it did not touch this—the love of her heart: she believed in Robert Lyon still.
And so she rose and spoke quite cheerfully, asking Elizabeth how she had managed, and whether the advertisement would be sure to be in on Monday morning.