She diligently searched the personal column of the Pursuivant; but no carefully worded appeal came to her.
Lilith could not understand this utter silence, even from Ancillon, who had himself fixed in this column as the medium of their intercommunication.
Ah! but Lilith did not know that a coroner’s jury had pronounced her dead—and come to her death “from a fatal blow on the back of her head, inflicted by a blunt instrument held in the hands of some person unknown,” and that she had been given up, if not forgotten, by all her friends.
So Lilith looked through the papers day by day, “hoping against hope” for some sign from her silent husband.
“He knows that I cannot make any,” she said, despairingly, to herself. “He knows that he discarded me, and drove me from his home with insult and contumely. He knows that in my farewell letter to him I wrote that if ever he should review his course towards me, retract his charges against me, and permit me to return, I would go to him, and be to him all that I have been—wife, housekeeper, secretary, guardian of his home, and helper in his office. Yes, I would, for although he does not love me, oh! my Heavenly Father, I do love him, and I cannot help it! Oh! if I could but return to him! But he does not want me. He will not have me. If I had stayed at Cloud Cliffs he would have gone away never to return while I ‘desecrated the house’ with my presence! He told me so! And oh! oh! the scorn and hatred of his looks when he spoke those words! No! he will never relent. He will never retract. He will never permit me to return—never in this world. It is no use to hope. Nothing is going to happen to bring us together. Nothing ever happens that one either hopes or fears. A poor wretch condemned to death hopes something may happen to save him; but it does not, and he dies. A happy girl looking forward to her bridal, fears something may happen to stop it; but it does not, and she marries. And oh! my Father, I still keep on hoping against hope; looking against a possibility for something to happen to open my husband’s eyes to show him how cruelly he has wronged me, to bring him to my side. Hoping and expecting with idiotic persistency. Yet I know that nothing will happen. I must ‘dree my weird,’ as the Scotch say.”
All this time Aunt Sophie watched her favorite with a troubled face, and often with tearful eyes. At last one day she said:
“There’s something on your mind, dear, that you never let on to any one about. What is it, dear?”
“It is nothing but vain regrets for all that I have lost, Aunt Sophie, and foolish, mad longings to recover the irrecoverable,” replied Lilith.
The gentle old lady did not quite comprehend her; but she said:
“I don’t believe as you want to go on this voyage, child. I have noticed as the nearer the time comes the worse you are. Now, if you don’t want to go, dear, don’t you go—don’t you. Stay here long o’ me!”