“Don’t say that,” she still whispered with a half-choking sob.
“You must try again,” he urged.
“Sir, is it easy to try again?”
“I don’t know,” he answered indifferently. “You seem to have a gift that way, therefore it must be.”
“I don’t know either,” she murmured wearily.
“Give it up,” he insinuated. “Seeing that you can’t do it, it is the only sensible course left.”
“I can do it, you fool!” she cried impetuously. “I can, I can—or rather I could.” And her voice dropped again, and from walking about she had come to a dead stand.
“How did you come by that bruise?” I asked, longing to get away, and hoping at least to change the conversation.
“I—someone struck at me as I came away,” she replied. “And yet I don’t know why—I did my best, and never meant to offend anyone. But it was all a dream—a horrible dream. Everything was upside down.”
And then she left us, and stumbled back to the altar, and burst into such a horrible fit of sobbing as I had never heard before.