Jack bowed, and turned away so as not to see the hot blushes on his sister’s face as she gave her orders for Annie’s burial.
That night Roy came himself to take Edna home. He was very sorry for Georgie, but, like Mrs. Burton, wondered at her love and grief for the little child.
“I would like to see the body. Can I?” he asked, and Georgie rose at once, and went with him into the darkened room where Annie lay.
Carefully, gently, she put back the thin covering, and then stood by Roy’s side while he looked upon the child.
“She must have been very beautiful in life; and there is a look on her face like you,” he said to Georgie, noticing for the first time how she shook as if in an ague chill. “You are sick; you have taken cold; this must not be,” he said, and he put his arm around her to lead her from the room.
But she held back, and laying one hand on the pale, dead face, grasped Roy’s shoulder with the other, and exclaimed:
“Not yet, Roy; wait a moment, please; hear me first; let me—”
He did not believe she knew at all what she was saying, and he cut her short and drew her forcibly away, just as she had, with a mighty effort, nerved herself to tell him why she had loved that little lifeless form so well.
“I meant to, I meant to, and he would not hear me. Surely it is not wrong to withhold it now,” she said to herself, when Roy had taken her from the room; and then came a sense of relief that, after all, he did not know, and she never need to tell. “Had she lived I would have kept my vow, but now I am free from it,” she thought, and there was a brighter look upon her face, and she moved about the house more like her olden self, but Maude, who watched her closely, saw that she shuddered every time Roy spoke pityingly to her, and that she seemed glad when at last he started for home, taking Edna with him.
The funeral was the next day, and Mrs. Burton came over in her carriage, and Roy came in his, bringing Edna and his mother with him. For once Georgie put fashion aside, and shocked her aunt by announcing her intention to go herself to Greenwood.