As she was leaving the room, Margery passed the bed on which the small, coarse garments lay. The little nightgown, with its short sleeves stiffly outstretched, seemed to arrest her attention specially. She caught at Susan’s dress as if she was unaware that she made the movement or of the sharp shudder which followed it.
“Those—are its things, aren’t they, Susan?” she said.
“Yes,” Susan answered, her sullen look of pain coming back to her face.
“I—don’t know—how people bear it!” exclaimed Margery. It was an exclamation, and her hand went quickly up to her mouth almost as if to press it back.
“They don’t bear it,” said Susan, stonily. “They have to go through it—that’s all. If you was standin’ on the gallows with the rope round your neck and the trap-door under your feet, you wouldn’t be bearin’ it, but the trap-door would drop all the same, an’ down you’d plunge—into the blackness.”
It was on this morning, on her way through the streets, that Margery dropped in a dead faint upon the pavement, and Miss Amory Starkweather, passing in her carriage, picked her up and carried her home.
Susan Chapman never saw her again. Some months afterwards came the rumour that she had died of consumption in Italy.