“It must be that he is dead,” she said again and again, and then as she grew more quiet, she calmly asked herself what she would do if her fears proved true, and her answer was, “If already married to Roy, I will abide by his verdict: if not, if I know for sure before the twentieth, I’ll kill myself.”
There was a suicidal expression in her eyes as she said this, and she had the look of a woman capable of doing any thing if once driven to bay. It was nearly morning before Georgie slept, if indeed that state can be called sleep, in which so much of horror and fear is mingled as there was in her troubled dreams.
She was very pale and haggard when she came down to breakfast, and complained of her head, which she said was aching badly. She had suffered a great deal from nervous headache since Annie’s death, and had sometimes expressed a fear that she should one day be crazy. She almost looked so now, with her unnaturally pallid face and glittering black eyes, and Mrs. Burton, always alarmed when anything ailed Georgie, made her lie down in a quiet, shaded little room in the rear of the house, and then sat by her all the morning, until Roy came and asked to see her. Then Georgie made a great effort to shake off the incubus which had fastened upon her, and dressing herself with the utmost care, went down to her lover and friends, and tried to be merry and gay, and felt a great load lifted from her spirits when Roy said:
“I think I have ascertained who our deliverer was. It is a poor man living near the spot where we were providentially saved from destruction, and I have charged Russell to see him, and remunerate him properly. He has a large family of children, I believe.”
“How did you hear who it was?” Georgie asked, and Roy replied: “I saw a man this morning from that vicinity who told me.”
After that Georgie did not longer doubt, and long before Roy left her, her headache passed away and the bright color came back to her cheeks, and one could almost see the filling up of her shrivelled flesh, and the fading of the dark circles beneath her eyes. Georgie was happy again, and that night her sleep was undisturbed by troubled dreams, or horrid dread of retributive justice overtaking her at the very moment when the cup of joy was in her grasp and almost at her lips.
CHAPTER XLI.
THE BURGLAR.
It was the 19th; the very day before the bridal. All the city guests had arrived, and there was a grand dinner at Oakwood, where the three long tables were set upon the lawn beneath the maples, the bright silver, and the gay flowers showing well through the surrounding shrubbery, and seeming to curious passers-by, who stopped a moment to look on, more like a fairy scene than a reality. And Georgie, in her elegant white dress, was queen of the banquet, and quite overshadowed Maude in her simple muslin, with a few flowers in her hair. As some beautiful rose, which has drooped and pined beneath the fervid heat of a hot summer day, revives again after a refreshing rain, and seems fairer than ever; so Georgie, with her mind at ease, blossomed with new grace and beauty, looking so well and appearing so well that none ever forgot her as she was on that afternoon, the last she was to know in peace.
Anticipating the festivities of the next night, the guests did not tarry late, but dispersed soon after dinner was over, each making some pleasant remark to the brides-elect, and wishing them as bright a to-morrow as to-day had been. Roy was not feeling well, and he, too, went early, telling Georgie that he should not come again until he came to claim her.