What would the neighbors think or say about her disappearance? They would certainly ask a great many questions. Country people always do. They would question and cross-question Mr. Hereward.
How would he answer them? Would he tell them the truth, or would he evade inquiry? And oh, above all, would he, could he, be any happier now that she was gone? Would he not sometimes remember how much she had loved him? How hard she had tried to please him? How diligently she had worked to help him, answering his letters, copying his speeches, searching out his authorities, and through all this secretary work keeping his one room in the attic of the crowded hotel neat, bright and attractive, and always taking such pure delight in being useful to him? Would Tudor remember these things, and think more kindly of her?
Ah, no! for he did not love her; he had told her so, and thanked the Lord that he did not love her! So all that she had tried to do had failed to please him.
Again the child Lilith wept as if her heart were breaking; and there was no one to comfort her.
CHAPTER VI
LILITH’S FIDELITY
Lilith sat in one corner of the Pullman car, with her chair wheeled around, her shoulders to all her fellow-passengers, and her face fronting the large mirror on the wall. She sat quite still, and wept silently.
Now there happened to be in the same car a lady who, in this year of grace 1882, might be called a Benevolent Crank; but the term had not been invented in her time. She was a large, rosy-cheeked, handsome matron, of perhaps fifty years, of the class called “motherly;” with such an exuberance of life, health, vitality and happiness as rendered her kindly affectioned, sympathetic and confiding towards every fellow-being.
She had got on the train at Baltimore and had ever since been sitting in the opposite corner to Lilith; not with her chair wheeled away from her fellow-passengers, but fronting them all as fellow-beings in whom she took a friendly interest, and looking with her kindly, smiling face, half shaded by the black plush bonnet, and her portly form wrapped in her fur-lined cloak, the very picture of comfort, contentment and benevolence.
She did not find much, however, in the seven men who shared the car to interest her—every one of them the incarnation of “business” or “politics,” as far as she could judge from physiognomies half hidden by the large, open newspapers they were reading.
Next she turned her social attention on the only woman beside herself in the car, and who sat in the opposite corner.