How grieved he looked—how white! He was evidently most honestly sorry for all the unkind things he had said to her. Not that he had said many, indeed, only—he had looked them. And she, she had been very hard—oh! too hard. However, there was an end to it. To-morrow would place more miles between them, in every way, than would ever be recrossed. He would not come here again until he had forgotten her—married, probably. They would not meet. There should have been comfort in that certainty, but, alas! when she sought for it, it eluded her—it was not there.
In spite of the trick Somnus had just played her, she would now gladly have courted him again, if only to escape from ever growing regret. But though she turns from side to side in a vain endeavor to secure him, that cruel god persistently denies her, and with mournful memories and tired eyes, she lies, watching, waiting for the tender breaking of the dawn upon the purple hills.
Slowly, slowly comes up the sun. Coldly, and with a tremulous lingering, the light shines on land and sea. Then sounds the bursting chants of birds, the rush of streams, the gentle sighings of the winds through herb and foliage.
Joyce, thankful for the blessed daylight, flings the clothes aside, and with languid step, and eyes, sad always, but grown weary, too, with sleeplessness and thoughts unkind, moves lightly to the window.
Throwing wide the casement, she lets the cool morning air flow in.
A new day has arisen. What will it bring her? What can it bring, save disappointment only and a vain regret? Oh! why must she, of all people, be thus unblessed upon this blessed morn? Never has the sun seemed brighter—the whole earth a greater glow of glory.
"Welcome, the lord of light and lamp of day: Welcome, fosterer of tender herbis green; Welcome, quickener of flourish'd flowers' sheen. Welcome depainter of the bloomit meads; Welcome, the life of everything that spreads!"
Yet to Joyce welcome to the rising sun seems impossible. What is the good of day when hope is dead? In another hour or two she must rise, go downstairs, talk, laugh, and appear interested in all that is being said—and with a heart at variance with joy—a poor heart, heavy as lead.
A kind of despairing rage against her crooked fortune moves her. Why has she been thus unlucky? Why at first should a foolish, vagrant feeling have led her to think so strongly of one unworthy and now hateful to her as to prejudice her in the mind of the one really worthy. What madness possessed her? Surely she is the most unfortunate girl alive? A sense of injustice bring the tears into her eyes, and blots out the slowly widening landscape from her view.
"How happy some o'er other some can be!"