“Patience for one moment, lady. I will leave you—as far as the next room—and never cross this threshold again. This chamber shall be your sanctuary. I will occupy the parlor. But I cannot leave you alone and unprotected in a strange city, dear. I must be on hand to take care of you, if needful. You are frightened now, Gloria. There is no need to be. I will not intrude. But we must have time to think what we shall next do.”
He spoke very gently.
And now she was weeping aloud.
He left the room at once.
“Oh! what a selfish and cruel wretch I am! What a change has come over me! I have turned into a demon! I must be a demon to hate those who love me! To hate them for loving me! Oh, I wish I were dead! I wish I had never lived!” she sobbed, throwing herself down upon the sofa in an agony of self-reproach and self-loathing.
David Lindsay walked up and down in the adjoining room, his steps noiseless on the soft carpet. He was sorely perplexed in mind and distressed at heart, only certain of two obligations resting upon him—not to intrude on her privacy, yet not to desert her in her weakness and distraction. She was but a child, he felt, a child who had grown up under very peculiar circumstances, so that she must not be judged as ordinary children or young girls. And what a heavenly child she had been! How full of love, how free from selfishness! Now she seemed indeed to have been driven into a state akin to insanity. Had he, her old playmate, who loved her better than his own life, had any hand in this? He could not think so. He, with all his honesty of inquiry, could not see any other way than that they had taken to save her from an odious marriage, which her religious faith would have condemned even if her own heart had not revolted against it—a marriage into which she could not have been compelled, of course, but into which she might have been, through her pity, persuaded. Now she was safe, at least from that danger.
Meanwhile, what was now his duty to her?
Not to intrude on her, and not to abandon her, certainly.
But afterwards?
He now remembered all that she had told him, while they sat together on the steamboat deck, concerning her father’s will, and how, on her attaining the age of eighteen, or on her marriage, she was to enter upon the possession of her estate, and the authority of her guardian was to cease; that this will had been made in Washington city, and recorded in the office of the Register of Wills.