CHAPTER XXIII. THE GARDEN.
Tenderly he led her into the garden, and down the walks now bare of bordering flowers. To Helen it looked like a graveyard; the dry bushes were the memorials of the buried flowers, and the cypress and box trees rose like the larger monuments of shapely stone. The day was a cold leaden one, that would have rained if it could, to get rid of the deadness at its heart, but no tears came. To the summer-house they went, under the cedar, and sat down. Neither spoke for some time.
“Poor Leopold!” said George at length, and took Helen’s hand.
She burst into tears, and again for some time neither spoke.
“George, I can’t bear it!” she said at length.
“It is very sad,” answered George. “But he had a happy life, I don’t doubt, up to—to—”
“What does that matter now? It is all a horrible farce.—To begin so fair and lovely, and end so stormy and cold and miserable!”
George did not like to say what he thought, namely, that it was Leopold’s own doing. He did not see that therein lay the deepest depth of the misery—the thing that of all things needed help: all else might be borne; the less that COULD be borne the better.
“It IS horrible,” he said. “But what can be done? What’s done is done, and nobody can help it.”