“You love me?” repeated Daisy, wonderingly. “I was beginning to believe every one hated me in the whole world, every one has been so bitter and so cruel with me, except poor old Uncle John. I often wonder why God lets me live––what am I to do with my life! Mariana in the moated grange, was not more to be pitied than I. Death relieved her, but I am left to struggle on.”
“Heaven hear her!” cried Ruth. “One suffers a great deal to lose all interest in life. You are so young, dear, you could not have suffered much.”
“I have lost all I hold dear in life,” she answered, pathetically, lifting her beautiful, childish blue eyes toward the white fleecy clouds tinted by the setting sun.
Their hearts ached for the pretty, lonely little creature. They believed she was thinking of her mother. So she was––and of Rex, the handsome young husband whom she so madly idolized in her worshipful childish fashion, who was worse than dead to her––the husband who should have believed in her honor and purity, though the world had cried out to him that she was false. He had thrust aside all possibility of her writing to him; cast her out from his life; left her to be persecuted beyond all endurance; bound by a vow she dare not break to keep her marriage with Rex a secret. Though he was more cruel than death, she loved Rex with a devotion that never faltered.
Daisy lay there, thinking of it all, while the soft, golden sunlight died out of the sky, and the deep dusk of twilight crept softly on.
Then the old ladies arose from their chairs, folded their knitting, and put it away. Dusk was their hour for retiring.
They were discussing which one should sit up with Daisy, when she summoned them all to her bedside.
“I want you all to go to bed and never mind me,” coaxed Daisy, with a strange light in her eyes. “Take a good sleep, 75 as I am going to do. I shall be very happy to-morrow––happier than I have ever been before!”
She clasped her white arms about their necks in turn, clinging to them, and sobbing as though she was loath to part with them.
Ruth’s hand she held last and longest.