For just one other such evening, for just one more talk, Martie was beginning to feel she would go mad. They had said so little then, they had known so little what this new separation would mean!
And Sally knew nothing of it. A sudden lonely blankness fell upon Martie's soul; it mattered nothing to Lydia and Rose and Sally that John Dryden loved her. It mattered more than life to her.
What use to talk of it? How flat the words would seem for that memory of everything high and splendid. Yet she felt the need of speech. She must talk of him to some one, now when it was too late: when he was out on the ocean: when she was perhaps never to see him again.
"Sis," she said, setting the filled plate in the centre of the table, "do you specially remember him?"
Sally had chanced to come to the old home for just a minute on the morning of her talk with John in the garden. Sally nodded now alertly.
"Certainly I do! He seemed a dear," she said cordially.
"I wish they had not come!" Martie said sombrely.
"You—wish—?" Sally's anxious eyes flashed to her face.
"That they had never come!"
"Oh, Mart! Oh, Mart, why?"