She had an instinctive knowledge, that Percy was trying to summon courage to tell her of his changed feelings. She shrank from it, as from a blow.
"I cannot hear him say the words," she moaned. "I cannot live and hear them from his lips; and I cannot let him go—I cannot, I cannot."
She grew thin and hollow-eyed, and the pathos of her face was heartrending. She tried to be cheerful and amuse Percy with her old flow of wit and anecdote. They took their usual drives, and indulged in theatres, and petits soupers afterward, as of old, but it was all a melancholy failure, a farce of their former happy days. Though he gave her the same gallant attentions, she knew his heart was not in it.
It was like looking on the dead face of a dear one: the features unchanged, but the spirit fled.
One day as he sat smoking a cigar in their pretty artistic rooms, while Dolores played a melancholy air on the piano, he determined to tell her of his resolution to leave her and go abroad. "I will not tell her that I love another," he thought; "that will give needless pain. But I cannot keep up this farce any longer. It must end."
"Dolores," he said, throwing away his cigar, "come and sit beside me on this ottoman. I want to talk with you."
She turned a pale, startled face to his, and her hands fell upon discordant keys.
"I will," she said, rising hurriedly, "in a moment. But first let me show you such a strange, sad little poem I found among some of Mrs. Butler's clippings to-day. Once I could not have understood such a sentiment. To-day I do. I remember showing you a poem that I thought applicable to ourselves another time, Percy. This is very unlike it."
She placed the slip of paper in his hand, and sat down beside him while he read it: her elbows resting on his knees, her brow bent on her clasped hands.
This was what he read: