People came sometimes to sit with him. Trixie, for instance, who had married her artist, and was now comfortably established in a decorative little cottage at Bedford Park, came daily, and as she had the tact to abstain from any obviously unfounded assumption of hopefulness, her presence did him good, and perhaps saved him from breaking down under the prolonged strain.
Martha, too, even though she had never been able to feel warmly towards her sister-in-law, cast aside some of her prejudice and held aloof no longer.
Martha was inclined to take a serious view of things, having caught something of her mother's gloomy Puritanism, which her own unhappy disposition and contracted life had done nothing to sweeten, and not a little to embitter. She was not, perhaps, incapable of improving the occasion for her brother's benefit even then, by warnings against devotion to perishable idols, and hints of chastenings which were intended as salutary.
But somehow, when she saw his lined and colourless face, and the look of ghastly expectation that came and went upon it at the slightest unexpected sound without, she lost hold of the conviction that his bereavement would work for his spiritual benefit; her words in season died unspoken on her lips, and she gave way at parting to tears of pity and sympathy, in which the saint was completely forgotten in the sister and the woman.
And now it was evening, and he was alone once more, pretending to read, and thinking drearily of what was coming; for the doctor had just left, and his report had been less encouraging than ever—a change must come before long, he had said, and from his manner it was too clear what he thought that change would be.
Mark let his thoughts wander back to his brief married life, doomed to be cut short by the very fraud which had purchased it. They had been so happy, and it was all over—henceforth he would be alone.
She was leaving him after all, and he could not even feel that her love would abide with him when she had gone; oh, the unspeakable agony of knowing that she welcomed death as a release from him!
Never now could he hope to regain the heart he had lost, she despised him—and she was dying.
No, she must not die, he cried wildly in his extremity, how could he live without her? Oh, that she might be given back to him, even though he could never make the dead love live in her heart again! Had he not suffered enough—was not this a punishment beyond his sin?
And yet, as he looked back, he knew that he himself had brought about this punishment, that it was but the stern and logical sequence of his fraud.