“Why not?” Jack asked, a little sharply, and Georgie replied:
“There can be nothing in common between this girl and people like the Leightons. Besides that, she really has no claim on them, for you know that Charlie had not a cent in the world of his own.”
“No, I did not; Charlie’s talk would lead one to a different conclusion,” Jack said, and Georgie continued:
“Yes, I know Charlie used to talk to strangers as if it was all his, when the facts are that the property came through the Leighton line, and neither Charlie nor his mother have anything except what Roy gives them. This girl thought otherwise, I dare say, and married for money more than anything else.”
“Heaven help her then, poor little thing,” Jack said, as he moved away, and his ejaculation was echoed in the faint cry which the “poor little thing” tried to smother as she, too, whispered gaspingly, “yes, Heaven help me, if all that woman has said is true.”
Edna was awake, and had been an unwilling listener to a conversation which made her at first grow angry and resentful, and then quiver and shake with a nameless terror of something coming upon her worse even than Charlie’s terrible death. To lose confidence in him whom she had trusted so implicitly; to know he had deceived her; aye, had died with a lie in his heart, if not on his lips, was terrible, and Edna felt for a moment as if she were going mad. From the lounge where she lay she could see a corner of the sheet which covered her dead, and with a shudder she turned herself away from that shrouded form, moaning bitterly:
“Oh, Charlie, is it true, and was it a lie you told me all the time. I didn’t care for your money. It isn’t that which hurts me so. It’s losing faith in you. Oh, Charlie, my lost, lost Charlie.”
One of the women of the house heard her, and catching the last words went in to comfort her. Her story was generally known by this time, and great was the sympathy expressed for her and the curiosity to see her, and there was a world of pity for her in the heart of the woman, who, feeling that she must say something, began in that hackneyed kind of way some people have of talking to one in sorrow:
“Don’t give way so, poor little dear. Your husband is not lost; he has only gone a little while before. You will meet him again some time. He is not lost forever.”
Edna fairly writhed in anguish, and could have screamed outright in her agony.