Phyllis bent closer to the story-teller in her intense interest. Why, it was like one of her fairy-tales! She held her breath to listen, while the old lawyer went gravely on.
"Allan could not have been more than twenty-two when he graduated, and it was a very short while afterwards that he became engaged to a young girl, the daughter of a family friend. Louise Frey was her name, was it not, love?"
"Yes, that is right," said his wife, "Louise Frey."
"A beautiful girl," he went on, "dark, with a brilliant color, and full of life and good spirits. They were both very young, but there was no good reason why the marriage should be delayed, and it was set for the following September."
A princess, too, in the story! But—where had she gone? "The two of them only," he had said.
"It must have been scarcely a month," the story went on—Mr. De Guenther was telling it as if he were stating a case—"nearly a month before the date set for the wedding, when the lovers went for a long automobile ride, across a range of mountains near a country-place where they were both staying. They were alone in the machine.
"Allan, of course, was driving, doubtless with a certain degree of impetuosity, as he did most things.... They were on an unfrequented part of the road," said Mr. De Guenther, lowering his voice, "when there occurred an unforeseen wreckage in the car's machinery. The car was thrown over and badly splintered. Both young people were pinned under it.
"So far as he knew at the time, Allan was not injured, nor was he in any pain; but he was held in absolute inability to move by the car above him. Miss Frey, on the contrary, was badly hurt, and in suffering. She died in about three hours, a little before relief came to them."
Phyllis clutched the arms of her chair, thrilled and wide-eyed. She could imagine all the horror of the happening through the old lawyer's precise and unemotional story. The boy-lover, pinioned, helpless, condemned to watch his sweetheart dying by inches, and unable to help her by so much as lifting a hand—could anything be more awful not only to endure, but to remember?
"And yet," she thought whimsically, "it mightn't be so bad to have one real tragedy to remember, if you haven't anything else! All I'll have to remember when I'm old will be bad little children and good little children, and books and boarding-houses, and the recollection that people said I was a very worthy young woman once!" But she threw off the thought. It's just as well not to think of old age when all the idea brings up is a vision of a nice, clean Old Ladies' Home.