Mrs. Downie, with the most old-fashioned, time-out-of-mind hospitality, would have pressed her to stay to dinner, to stay to tea, to spend the whole evening, but the baroness smiled, pleaded a pressure of engagements, and departed.
“She’s good! she’s mighty good. But, oh! what a sinner I am. For I’m so awful jealous of her, all the same. But I can’t help it, and it’s all because of you, honey,” said Aunt Sophie, as soon as she was left alone with Lilith. “I must get the brethren to pray for me,” she added.
From that memorable evening on which Madame Von Bruyin had told her own heart history to Lilith Hereward, the two friends were drawn closer together in sympathy and affection.
It was strange that Hereward’s young wife, though she admired her husband’s first love so excessively, and underrated her own self so humbly, yet felt no great jealousy of her rival.
Perhaps it was because Tudor himself had been the first to tell her of that first love, that mad though “brief infatuation,” as he had called it; and because, on referring to its object, he had spoken of her only in terms of contempt and displeasure; so, at any rate, for this cause or for that, Lilith, on cool reflection, saw no cause to be jealous of her beautiful rival. She felt even some compassion for her, as for a fellow-sufferer from Hereward’s great injustice—for had not Hereward denounced her as a false woman, a self-seeker, a double-dealer, a coquette, a traitress, a jilt? And all because Leda Von Kirschberg, after having promised her hand, discovered that she had a heart, and tried to do her duty between the two!
CHAPTER XII
NATIVE LAND ADIEU
As the day of sailing drew near, Lilith’s heart sank into utter despondency.
Up to this time she had been almost unconsciously sustained by the recognized uncertainty of human affairs; by the deep-seated hope that “something might happen” to delay the voyage, or perhaps to put it off altogether.
She watched the newspapers for news of Hereward; but she found none. She knew that Congress was still in session in Washington, and she read all the Congressional reports in the hope of finding his name; but it was not there; not in any debate; not in any speech; not even in the mere rank and file of the yeas and nays when a vote was taken. It seemed to have dropped quite out of public affairs. What had become of that once shining beacon of liberty and light?
Lilith could not even conjecture.