Meeting this look, Mrs. Dallas smiled—a smile that was sadder than tears.
“Oh, Hannah, I am so unhappy,” she said. “I want to tell you but I don’t know how. Oh, my child, I am so miserable.”
Her utterance had still that little foreign accent that made it so pathetic, although, in spite of some odd blunders, she had become almost fluent in the English tongue. There was still no indication of tears in either her voice or her eyes, as she leaned back in the padded chair, her head supported by its top, and her long bare arms with their picturesque Greek bracelets resting wearily on its cushioned sides.
Hannah looked at her with the tenderness of her kind heart overflowing in great tears from her eyes and rolling down her cheeks. She pressed her handkerchief to her face in the vain effort to keep them back, but the woman for whom they fell shed no tears. She sat there calm and quiet in her youth and beauty and looked at the plain little school-teacher with a wistful gaze that seemed as if it might be envy.
“Tell me, Hannah,” she said presently, when the girl had dried her eyes and grown more calm, “tell me frankly, no matter how strange it may seem to you to have the question asked, what do you think of my husband?”
This startling question naturally found Hannah unprepared with an answer, and after clearing her throat and getting rather red, she said confusedly that she had seen so little of Mr. Dallas, her intercourse with him had been so slight, that she really did not feel that she knew him well enough to give an answer.
“You know him as well as I do,” his wife replied. “As he is to you—as you see him daily, exactly so he is to me. I have waited and waited for something more, but in vain. I have come at last to the conclusion that this is all.”
Hannah, between wonder and distress, began to feel the tears rise again. The other saw them and bent forward and took her hand.
“Don’t cry, poor little thing,” she said. “Yes—cry if you can. It shows your heart is soft still—mine is as hard as stone. Oh, God, how I have cried!” she broke off, in a voice grown suddenly passionate. “How I have laid awake at night and cried until my body was exhausted with the sobs. I have thought of my little white bed in the convent, where I slept so placidly, for every night of all those blessed, quiet, peaceful years, until my whole longing would be that I might once more lay myself down upon it and close my eyes forever. If an angel from Heaven had offered me a wish it would have been that one. Oh, Hannah, you do not know. You ought to be so happy. You are so happy. Do you know it? I didn’t know it, and I was never grateful for it, but always looking forward to being happy in the future, and oh, how I am punished!”
She wrung her hands together and bit the flesh of her soft lips, as if with a sense of anguish too bitter to be borne.