"Two weeks before it will reach them, two weeks more before an answer can arrive, and another two weeks before I can be with them. Oh, dear me! dear me! how shall I drag out life during these interminable weeks. If I could only die at once and end it all."
Tears of unutterable wretchedness and loneliness and misery coursed down her pale, thin cheeks. Surely no one ever paid more dearly for love's short madness than this unfortunate little Rose.
"Marry in haste and repent at leisure," she thought, with unspeakable bitterness. "Oh, how happy I might have been to-day if I had only done right last year. But I was mad and treacherous and false, and I dare-say it serves me right. How can I ever look them in the face when I go home?"
The weary weeks dragged on, how wearily and miserably only Rose knew. She never went out; she sat all day long in that shabby parlour, and stared blankly at the passers-by in the street, waiting, waiting.
The good-natured landlady and her daughter took charge of the baby during those wretched weeks of expectation, or Mrs. Reginald Stanford's only son would have been sadly neglected.
April was gone; May came in, bringing the anniversary of Rose's ill-starred marriage and finding her in that worst widowhood, a day of ceaseless tears and regrets to the unhappy, deserted wife. The bright May days went by, one after another, passing as wretched days and more wretched nights do pass somehow; and June had taken its place. In all this long, long time, no letter had come for Rose. How she watched and waited for it; how she had strained her eyes day after day to catch sight of the postman; how her heart leaped up and throbbed when she saw him approach, and sank down in her breast like lead as he went by, only those can know who have watched and waited like her. A sickening sense of despair stole over her at last. They had forgotten her; they hated and despised her, and left her to her fate. There was nothing for it but to go to the alms-house and die, like any other pauper.
She had been mad when she fancied they could forgive her. Her sins had been too great. All the world had deserted her, and the sooner she was dead and out of the way the better.
She sat in the misty June twilight thinking this, with a sad, hopeless kind of resignation. It was the fifth of June. Could she forget that this very day twelvemonth was to have been her wedding-day? Poor Jules—poor Kate! Oh, what a wretch she had been!
She covered her face with her hands, tears falling like rain through her thin fingers.
"I wonder if they will be sorry for me, and forgive me, when they hear I am dead?" she thought. "Oh, how I live, and live; when other women would have died long ago with half this trouble. Only nineteen, and with nothing left to wish for but death."