‘None!’ She was silent awhile, and then very slowly she raised her head; her brows contracted, and she looked past them both into vacancy. If she was communing with her own heart, the results were very sad. Despair itself gathered in her eyes. She turned presently and looked at Wyndham. ‘I wish,’ said she, with a forlorn look, ‘that I had the courage to die.’
It was unutterably sad, this young creature, with all her life before her, praying for courage to end it; craving for death in the midst of life, wishing she had the courage to escape from a world that had evidently given her but a sorry welcome.
Wyndham looked round at the Professor as if expecting him to join in his commiseration for this poor, unhappy child, but what he saw in the Professor’s face checked him. It startled him, and stopped the tide of sympathy for a time—as great floods will for the moment always catch and carry with them the milder rushes of the rivers near.
The Professor’s face was indeed a study. It was radiant—alight with a strange and sudden hope. His piercing eyes were fixed immovably upon the girl. They seemed to burn into her as though demanding and compelling an answering glance from hers.
She obeyed the call; slowly, languidly she lifted her head.
‘So you would die?’ said he.
‘Yes.’ The word fell listlessly from her lips; but she stared straight at him as she said it, and her young unhappy face looked nearly as gray as the old merciless one bending over it.
‘Then why live?’ pursued he. ‘Death is easy.’
‘No, it is hard,’ she said. ‘And I am afraid of pain.’
‘If there were no pain, you would risk it, then?’