The dire calamity she had hourly dreaded might happen, had come at last, and yet there seemed to be an impossibility in the realisation of it.
Oh, why did men become soldiers?
'Alone—alone in the world now!' wailed Mary.
'My darling, you have me and my little girls to love you as sisters,' said Mrs. Deroubigne, folding the deathly-pale girl again and again to her motherly breast; but, passionate though her sympathy and regard, Mary shivered, and thought who could ever replace Ellinor as a sister, and felt, as she said, most fearfully alone.
Her mind at times became confused. Something more had happened to her—she scarcely knew what it was.
Never again did it seem possible that she could take any interest in the life of the world and its daily routine. She was apathetic—careless of what was done with herself or anything around her.
Existence and its ties seemed over and done with, yet her present calamity seemed also a kind of dream to her. 'Sometimes in great trouble,' says a writer, 'the brain acts in this way of itself—it will return to events of long ago and recall them vividly, while the immediate moment becomes remote. But the reaction is all the more intense for this mental rest; and when the mind returns to the contemplation of the present it is to see with greater vividness.'
'The embassy massacred to a man!' How often was she to reiterate mentally that appalling line?
It was now Mary's evil fortune to feel perhaps—nay, surely—more keenly than her sister had done this new calamity, for poor Ellinor had certainly ceased for a time to love, though she had never failed to respect Robert Wodrow, now deemed also with the dead.
All was silent in that pretty villa by the broad and shining Elbe—shining in the light of the moon. The fire glowed in the tall, cylindrical, porcelain stove in a corner of the room; that room ere while decorated and prepared for her and Ellinor so lovingly by Mrs. Deroubigne, and there she lay restless, sleepless, and alone, too bewildered to realise the dire calamity that had befallen her, and been acted in blood and wrath so far, far away, and yet but a few hours ago.