Nearly six weeks had intervened between Rufus Black’s proposal of marriage to Neva Wynde on the road-side bank and his final rejection by her in the music-room at Hawkhurst.
It will be remembered that there had been a hidden witness to the half-despairing, half-loving, proposal of Rufus, and that this hidden witness, seeing, but unseen, was no other than the wronged young wife whom Rufus Black mourned as dead, and whom in his soul he loved a thousand-fold better than the beautiful young heiress.
During the six weeks that had passed, what had become of Lally—poor, heart-broken, despairing Lally?
We have narrated how she staggered away in the night gloom, after seeing Rufus and Neva together in the square of light from the home windows upon the marble terrace, not knowing whither she went, but hurrying as swiftly as she might from her young husband, from happiness, and from hope itself.
She had no thought of suicide. She had learned many lessons by the bedside of her old friend the seamstress, whose dying hours she had cheered. She had learned that life may be very bitter and hard to bear, but that it may not be thrown aside, or flung back in anger or despair to the Giver. Its burdens must be borne, and he who bears them with earnest patience, and in humble obedience to the divine will, shall some day exchange the cross of suffering for the crown of a great reward. No; Lally, weak and frail as she was, deserted by humanity, would never again seriously think of suicide.
She wandered on in the soft starlight and moonlight, a helpless, homeless, hopeless creature, with nowhere to go, as we have said. She had no money in her pocket, no food, and her shoes were worn out, and her clothes were patched and darned and pitiably frayed and worn. The very angels must have pitied her in her utter forlornness.
For an hour or two she tottered on, but at last wearied to exhaustion, she sank down in the shelter of a way-side hedge, and sobbed and moaned herself to sleep.
She was awake again at daybreak, and hurried up and on, as if flying from pursuit. About eleven o’clock she came to a hop-garden, divided from the road by wooden palings. There were men and women, of the tramp species, busy at work here under the supervision of the hop farmer. Lally halted and clung to the palings with both hands, and looked through the interstices upon the busy groups with dilating eyes.
She was worn with anguish, but even her mental sufferings could not still the demands of nature. She was so hungry that it seemed as if a vulture were gnawing at her vitals. She felt that she was starving.
The hop-pickers, many of them tramps who lived in unions and alms-houses in the winter, and who stray down into Kent during the hop season, presently discovered the white and hungry face pressed against the palings, and jeered at the girl, and called her names she could not understand, making merry at her forlornness.