"Ah!... You poor, poor child!..."
And her heart, which had been quite dead, was suddenly alive and twisting within her....
She had been engulfed in her own abyss. Tragedy was on every side, horrors pouring in, swamping her being. Feeling had drowned in the icy void. Not Hen's tears had touched her, not her father's stricken grief. But when her eyes came upon this small face, something written there pierced her through and through. Such a shocking little face it was, so pinched with no hope of tears....
In the darkness of the shuttered office, two stood near who were worlds apart. And, for the first time since she had looked down from her window at home, Cally was lifted out of herself....
"I--you must let me see you--in a day or two, won't you?" she said hurriedly, below her breath. "I should like so much ... to help you, if I could...."
A quiver went over the little mask; but the girl spoke in the same stony way:
"Oh, ma'am ... it's so kind.... I'll go now."
But the hollowness of Cally's speech had mocked the sudden sympathy upwelling within her. Her arm was upon the work-girl's frail shoulder; her indistinct voice suddenly tremulous.
"Don't think I imagine that any one can ever replace.... You must know I understand ... what your loss is."
Kern shrunk against the wall by the door. No moment this, to speak of what had so long been hid.