“I had no intention to let you die so easily,” said the apothecary, softly. “I read your thoughts too plainly for that. I did not give you laudanum, but a harmless mixture instead, and followed you to see if my surmise was correct. You are young and fair––surely life could not have lost all hope and sunshine for you?”
“You do not know all,” said Daisy, wearily, “or you would not have held me back. I do not know of another life so utterly hopeless as my own.”
The good man looked at the sweet, innocent, beautiful face, upon which the starlight fell, quite bewildered and thoughtful.
“I should like to know what your trouble is,” he said, gently.
“I could tell you only one half of it,” she replied, wearily. “I have suffered much, and yet through no fault of my own. I am cast off, deserted, condemned to a loveless, joyless life; my heart is broken; there is nothing left me but to die. I repeat that it is a sad fate.”
“It is indeed,” replied the apothecary, gravely. “Yet, alas! not an uncommon one. Are you quite sure that nothing can remedy it?”
“Quite sure,” replied Daisy, hopelessly. “My doom is fixed; and no matter how long I live, or how long he lives, it can never be altered.”
The apothecary was uncomfortable without knowing why, haunted by a vague, miserable suspicion, which poor Daisy’s words secretly corroborated; yet it seemed almost a sin to harbor one suspicion against the purity of the artless little creature before him. He looked into the fresh young face. There was no cloud on it, no guilt lay brooding in the clear, truthful blue eyes. He never dreamed little Daisy was a wife. “Why did he not love her?” was the query the apothecary asked himself over and over again; “she is so young, so loving, and so fair. He has cast her off, this man to whom she has given the passionate love of her young heart.”
“You see you did wrong to hold me back,” she said, gently. “How am I to live and bear this sorrow that has come upon me? What am I to do?”
She looked around her with the bewildered air of one who had lost her way, with the dazed appearance of one from beneath whose feet the bank of safety has been withdrawn. Hope was dead, and the past a blank.