“Ne-e-ver,” and Georgie shook her head and touched her helpless hand. “Ne-e-ver,—de-ad,” touching again her hand and arm; then pointing to her face and heart she continued, “Shall—die—soon;—tell—Roy—f-ree—n-ow.”
She was growing excited, and Jack left her with Maude, and went out to Roy, who stopped in his walk and asked how Georgie was, and when he might see her.
“Not yet,” Jack said. “She seems morbid on that subject; perhaps because her face is not quite natural, and she thinks it might distress you to see her beauty so marred. And, Roy, she sent me to tell you that you are free. She insisted that I should come,” he added, as he met Roy’s look of surprise. “She was growing excited, and to quiet her I came to tell you that you are free from your engagement.”
For an instant Roy experienced a feeling of relief, a lifting of his spirits, but he quickly put it aside, and said to Jack:
“Tell your sister that only her death or mine can sever the tie between us. She was to have been my wife to-night, and as such I look upon her, no matter how maimed and stricken she may be. Tell her I am waiting to see her, to help you take care of her, that I think I have a right superior to yours. Ask if I may come.”
This was his answer, which Jack carried to Georgie, who, with a frantic effort, tried to raise her helpless hand to clasp within the other, while her lips quivered and the tears rolled in torrents down her cheeks.
“Don’t—de-serve—it,” she managed to articulate, and Jack, who knew her so well, felt that she spoke truly, but pitied her just the same, and tried to quiet and comfort her, and asked her if she would see Roy then.
She shook her head; but when Jack said, “Is it a comfort to you to know that he is here?” she nodded twice; and so, though he could not see her, Roy staid all night at Oakwood, and for hours walked slowly up and down the piazza, always in the same attitude, with head bent forward and his hands locked behind him. They had told him that Georgie was quieter when she heard his step, and that when it ceased she seemed to listen for it; and so, unmindful of his own fatigue, he kept up the same weary round, until the moon, which should have lighted him to the altar, was past the zenith, and down toward the west. Then Jack came out and told him Georgie was asleep. So he paused in his walking, and sinking into a chair began to feel how worn and tired he was.
Edna had come over late in the afternoon, and with Maude and Jack was watching by Georgie’s bedside. She had not seen Roy since the morning when she had broken the tidings to him; but when Jack came in and told how exhausted he was, she poured a glass of wine from a decanter on the sideboard, and placing it with some crackers on a little silver tray, carried it out to him.
“You are tired, Mr. Leighton,” she said, “and I have brought you this; try and take some of it.”