A feeling of shame seemed for the first time to come over him as he realized whose sympathy it was that was offered him; and he drew his hand away from hers.
“Every one has reason to be sorry for any one else who is unhappy,” said she. “And when you see that even I can feel sympathy with you, you will see that you have friends who are worth living for yet.”
“Not I, not I,” murmured he, in a broken voice. “There is nothing left for me. She had promised to marry me—she is not a lady by birth, you know, and I could have made her one by position. I would have worked for her—I have worked for her—I have done more. But I used up all I had too fast—she saw I had no more; she said, if she married me, we should starve. And she looked at me quite coldly with her beautiful eyes, and said she was not well-educated enough to marry a gentleman—a gentleman! I, a poor cripple! It was that—it is always that! There is no happiness, no love for me; nothing but pity—wretched, miserable, scornful pity, that stings me more than taunts, more than hatred. She pitied me, I dare say, and laughed at me, and let me go;” and he broke down into incoherent words and sobbing.
Annie tried bright words of encouragement, asked him if he thought nothing of her friendship, of that of the rest of his family; but she spoke to deaf ears. When at length she rose to go, he gave her his hand and said, but still coldly:
“Thank you. I shall be glad presently that you came. It was good of you to come—generous—and I thank you. If I had a long life before me, I would try to do you some service; but I am played out now, and there is not much of my life left to run. Good-bye, Annie.”
She could not stay. His last words were almost a command to go. She had not mentioned her husband’s name. She thought that, in the state of mind in which she was leaving the cripple, the dread of an angry visitor might make him desperate; and she knew very well that, when Harry saw the miserable condition to which his sensitive cousin was reduced, he was no more likely to be unmerciful than she had been.
But she could not shake off a foreboding that the meeting between the cousins would be productive of evil, and she reached home anxious and thoughtful.
Her misgivings were not without foundation.
Within an hour of her departure from Stephen’s lodging, Harry drove up in a hansom and was directed, as his wife had been, to the little room on the top floor. He entered with a very stern face and firm tread; but the sight of the cripple, lying half on the sofa, half on a chair, in a state of utter prostration of body and mind, made him pause. The other looked up at him without fear, without feeling of any kind.
“Do you know me?” asked Harry, abruptly.