"My dear Mrs. Gilbert," he said, taking her hand, and leading her to a seat; "my poor child,—so little more than a child,—so little wiser or stronger than a child,—it seems cruel to come to you at such a time; but life is very hard sometimes——"
"It was very kind of you to come," Isabel exclaimed, interrupting him. "I wanted to see you, or some one like you; for everything seems so dreadful to me. I never thought that he would die."
She began to cry, in a weary helpless way, not like a person moved by some bitter grief; rather like a child that finds itself in a strange place and is frightened.
"My poor child, my poor child!"
Charles Raymond still held Isabel's passive hand, and she felt tears dropping on it; the tears of a man, of all others the last to give way to any sentimental weakness. But even then she did not divine that he must have some grief of his own—some sorrow that touched him more nearly than George Gilbert's death could possibly touch him. Her state of feeling just now was a peculiarly selfish state, perhaps; for she could neither understand nor imagine anything outside that darkened house, where death was supreme. The shock had been too terrible and too recent. It was as if an earthquake had taken place, and all the atmosphere round her was thick with clouds of blinding dust produced by the concussion. She felt Mr. Raymond's tears dropping slowly on her hand; and if she thought about them at all, she thought them only the evidence of his sympathy with her childish fears and sorrows.
"I loved him like my own son," murmured Charles Raymond, in a low tender voice. "If he had not been what he was,—if he had been the veriest cub that ever disgraced a good old stock,—I think even then I should have loved him as dearly and as truly, for her sake. Her only son! I've seen him look at me as she looked when I kissed her in the church on her wedding-day. So long as he lived, I should have never felt that she was really lost to me."
Isabel heard nothing of these broken sentences. Mr. Raymond uttered them in low musing tones, that were not intended to reach any mortal ears. For some little time he sat silently by the girl's side, with her hand still lying in his; then he rose and walked up and down the room with a soft slow step, and with his head drooping.
"You have been very much shocked by your husband's death?" he said at last.
Isabel began to cry again at this question,—weak hysterical tears, that meant very little, perhaps.
"Oh, very, very much," she answered. "I know I was not so good as I ought to have been; and I can never ask him to forgive me now."