The daydream was over. It had all come back again—the forlorn, dreary, hard-working world.
"Good-by, Mr. Roy." And they shook hands.
"One word," he said hastily. "I shall write to you—you will allow me?—and I shall see you several times, a good many times before I go?"
"I hope so."
"Then, for the present, good-by. That means," he added, earnestly,
"'God be with you!' And I know he always will."
In another minute Fortune found herself standing beside the laurel bush, alone, listening to the sound of Mr. Roy's footsteps down the road—listening, listening, as if, with the exceeding tension, her brain would burst.
The carriage came, passed by; it was not Mrs. Dalziel's after all. She thought he might discover this, and come back again; so she waited a little—five minutes, ten—beside the laurel bush. But he did not come. No footstep, no voice; nothing but the faint, far-away sound of the long waves washing in upon the sands.
It was not the brain that felt like to burst now, but the heart. She clasped her hands above her head. It did not matter; there was no creature to see or hear that appeal—was it to man or God?—that wild, broken sob, so contrary to her usual self-controlled and self-contained nature. And then she learned her forehead against the gate, just where Robert Roy had accidentally laid his hand in opening it, and wept bitterly.
Chapter 2.
The "every day" on which Mr. Roy had reckoned for seeing his friend, or whatsoever else he considered Miss Williams to be, proved a failure. Her youngest pupil fell ill, and she was kept beside him, and away from the school-room, until the doctor could decide whether the illness was infectious or not. It turned out to be very trifling—a most trivial thing altogether, yet weighted with a pain most difficult to bear, a sense of fatality that almost overwhelmed one person at least. What the other felt she did not know. He came daily as usual; she watched him come and go, and sometimes he turned and they exchanged a greeting from the window. But beyond that, she had to take all passively. What could she, only a woman, do or say or plan? Nothing. Women's business is to sit down and endure.