“John Lister,” she said, and every tone of her sweet pure voice seemed to ring through the stillness of that room as I realised more and more the treasure he had cast away. “You are a young man yet, and you may live to learn what the love of a woman really is. Once given, it is beyond recall. The tender plant I would have given, you crushed beneath your heel. That love, as it sprang up again, I gave to Stephen Hallett, who holds it still.”
He started from her with a look of awe upon his face, as she crossed her hands upon her breast and stood looking upward: “For he is not dead, but sleeping; and I—I am waiting for the time when I may join him, where the weary are at rest.”
She ceased speaking, and John Lister slowly rose from his knee, white with disappointment and rage, for he had anticipated an easy conquest.
He looked at her, as she was standing with her eyes closed, and a rapt expression of patient sorrow upon her beautiful face. Then, turning to me with a furiously vindictive look upon his face, he clenched his fists.
“This is your doing,” he hissed; “but my day will come, Antony Grace, and then we’ll see.”
He rushed from the room, choking with impotent fury, and nearly running against Hetty, who was coming in.
I was frightened, for there was a strange look in Miriam Carr’s face, and I caught her hands in mine.
“Send for help, Hetty,” I cried excitedly; “she is ill.”
“No, no,” Miss Carr answered, unclosing her eyes; “I often feel like that. Hetty, dear, help me to my room; I shall be better there.”
I hastened to hold the door open as Miriam Carr went towards it, leaning on Hetty’s arm, and as they reached me Miss Carr turned, placed her arms round my neck, and kissed me tenderly as a mother might her son. Then, as I stood there gazing through a veil of tears at which I felt no shame, the words that I had heard her utter seemed to weigh me down with a burden of sorrow that seemed greater than I could bear. I felt as if a dark cloud was coming down upon my life, and that dark cloud came, for before a year had passed away, Hetty and I—by her father’s dying wish, young wife and young husband—stood together looking down upon the newly planted flowers close beside poor Hallett’s grave.