Greswold heard the doctor talking in the upper chamber as he stood by the gate. The deep, grave tones were audible in the evening stillness, and there was another sound that chilled the Squire’s heart: the sound of a woman’s suppressed weeping.
He waited at the gate. He had not the nerve to go into the cottage and face that sorrowing widow. It seemed to him as if the child’s peril were his fault. It was not enough that he had taken all reasonable precautions. He ought to have foreseen the idiocy of his servants. He ought to have been more on the alert to prevent evil.
The great round moon came slowly up out of a cluster of Scotch firs. How black the branches looked against that red light! Slowly, slowly gliding upward in a slanting line, the moon stole at the back of those black branches, and climbed into the open sky.
How often Lola had watched such a moonrise at his side, and with what keen eyes she had noted the beauty of the spectacle! It was not that he had trained her to observe and to feel the loveliness of nature. With her that feeling had been an instinct, born with her, going before the wisdom of maturity, the cultivated taste of travelled experience.
To-night she was lying in her darkened room, the poor head heavy and painful on the pillow. She would not see the moon rising slowly yonder in that cloudless sky.
“No matter; she will see it to-morrow, I hope,” he said to himself, trying to be cheerful. “I am a morbid fool to torment myself; she has been subject to headaches of late. Mildred is right.”
And then he remembered that death and sorrow were near—close to him as he stood there watching the moon. He remembered poor little Polly Rainbow, and desponded again.
A woman’s agonised cry broke the soft summer stillness, and pierced George Greswold’s heart.
“The child is dead!” he thought.
Yes, poor little Polly was gone. The widow came out to the gate presently, sobbing piteously, and clasped Mr. Greswold’s hand and cried over it, broken down by her despair, leaning against the gate-post, as if her limbs had lost the power to bear her up.