"Failing fast," said Father Lennard. "I do not think she will wear the night through!"
"You are coming back, I suppose?"
"I shall endeavor to do so. I promised her I would, poor child!"
The doctor went into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Marsh, through her tears, told him who was with her. The old doctor looked dissatisfied.
"They'll agitate her too much—I know they will, with their crying and taking on. If they stay long, I will go and turn them out!"
He waited for a quarter of an hour, watch in hand, frowning impatiently at the dial-plate, and then the chamber-door reopened and the half-sisters came out. The swollen eyes of the governess told how she had been weeping, but the other had dropped her vail once more, and was invisible. Dr. Leach bowed to her, but she passed on without seeming to see him. Miss Rose followed her to the door, and looked wistfully out at the wet, foggy November weather, and the hopeless slough of mud.
"You cannot walk back, Harriet. I will send Peter to Redmon for the carriage. You will get your death of cold to walk there, unused as you are to walking."
"What does it matter?" she said, in a strangely hollow voice, "the sooner I get my death the better. If I could only die like her, I should rejoice however soon it came!"
"But, Harriet——"
But Harriet was gone, even while she spoke, walking rapidly through the drizzling rain and clammy mud—she, who had had a fastidious horror of mud on her dainty boots—and knowing nothing of either. All that was best in her nature had been roused into life by that dying-bed, but still that utter sense of despair and desolation filled her soul. Her life was done—there was no future for her—in all the wide universe there was not such another miserable woman as herself, she thought—desolate, unloved, and alone.