“Is it a picture?—won’t the new one find itself?”
“It’s—it’s something a great deal worse than unthinkable pictures,” said Isabel dismally.
“Then it must be very bad indeed. Tell me about it, Bella, dear.”
“I can’t; there isn’t anything to tell. He is gone—I sent him away, and he will never come back!” sobbed Isabel, with womanly inconsistency.
Dorothy permitted herself a little sigh of relief. It was only a lovers’ quarrel between her sister and Harry, the last of many, and perhaps a little more serious than some of the others, but still only that. The wound would heal of itself, as such hurtings do, yet she made haste to pour the wine and oil of sympathy into it.
“Don’t cry, dear. He will come back—he can’t help coming back,” she prophesied confidently.
Isabel shook her head as one who knows and may not be comforted. “No, he won’t—not the man that I sent away. Harry, the good-natured, obstinate boy that we used to tease and make fun of, might; but this grown man that I never knew till the other day is quite different. He will never put it off with a laugh and come back as if nothing had happened—I know he won’t.”
Thus Isabel, thinking only of the seeming change wrought in her lover by the quick shifting of her own point of view, and Dorothy, with the chill of a nameless fear benumbing her, could only repeat her prophecy:
“He will come back; never fear, Bella.”
“I wish I could believe it, but I can’t. O Dothy, if you could have seen his face when he went away! I shall never forget how he looked, not if I should live to be a hundred.”