The days dragged along their weary hours after that and no news came of Maud.
The Broughams felt as if an earthquake had come into their lives, leaving them all uprooted; as if nothing could let them settle down to the old routine of life till Maud came back, and without even putting it into words to each other, they all looked drearily forward into days and weeks and months and years, and pictured Maud as never coming back, but growing up somewhere, somehow, with somebody. Truly it was worse than death.
Gladly would they have pulled down their blinds and darkened the house and put on mourning.
When Jerry died, it had not been like this. They wept and sorrowed for him, but they laid him to rest in sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection. He was safe. It was the uncertainty of Maud's fate, her surroundings, her associates, the awful uncertainty of everything concerning her, that made this trial so unbearable, that it seemed to every one of them that they could not bear it for another day.
Yet God knew. The only comfort they had, came to them in that thought.
Their friends were kindness itself; every sort of sympathy, except the sympathy of flowers, was offered them. Special prayer was made in church for those who were "any ways afflicted or distressed," for the story was in every one's mouth, and mothers with little children guarded them jealously, and thought of what they would feel if one of them was taken from them as Maud had been.
But outside of her own home no sympathy was shown to Gertrude.
The place rang with her name. Mrs. Parsons had gone about with her story of the handsome young man in the down train, the meeting with whom Gertrude had not even allowed her little sister to witness, and the stories grew and grew on that foundation, till every picnic or tennis party that Gertrude had attended that summer, was transformed into a separate flirtation or supplied an anecdote to Gertrude's disadvantage.
She had rejoiced at knowing everybody in Old Keston who was worth knowing, but now she wished sadly that she was utterly unknown. She felt that she was pointed at and whispered about, as "the girl that lost her little sister."
Pauline Stacey gathered up all the stories and recounted them to Gertrude with an apologetic air that meant nothing, but covered her real enjoyment in the telling of the gossip, and Gertrude had not the heart to stop her.