“From your house.”
She pointed to the blue sky as she spoke, and gazed earnestly upwards.
“See—see—yon cloud is waiting for you,” she said suddenly. “So you have come from your own house of light and everlasting joy, to speak words of comfort to poor Mad Maud? I bless—bless you.”
The poor creature covered her face with her hands, and wept aloud in her fulness of heart.
Ada gently laid her small hand upon Maud’s arm, and led her unresistingly into the house, closing the door after her.
“Do not weep now,” she said; “I saw you the sport of many from a window in this house. What you may have done to anger those who so hotly followed you with shouts and cries, I know not; but it is sufficient for me that you are faint and weary. You shall have refreshment, and as long a rest here as I dare, for your own safety as well as my own, offer you.”
Maud withdrew her hands from before her eyes, and gazed earnestly at Ada.
“Are you indeed mortal?” she said. “Must I once more, for your sake, love my kind?”
“I am as you see me,” said Ada, “a poor helpless girl. Here, take refreshment, and deem me not inhospitable if I tell you then to go from this place, and forget you ever saw it.”
Ada placed before the poor, half-famished being such food as she had in the house, and, while she ate of the meat and bread voraciously, Ada amused herself with conjecture as to who and what this singular creature could be, who seemed, in some strange and confused manner, mixed up with her own fate.