“This distressing news of Mrs. Dalrymple has driven everything else out of my head. Is it really so bad, Cora?”
“It is the strangest case I ever heard of, Frank. Aunt Verna has been steadily declining for long months of a malady so obscure that no doctor can diagnose it, and she declares herself that it is a breaking heart.”
“Oh, how sad, how pitiful!” he cried, and his thoughts returned to the day when he had seen her bending, a sad, black-draped figure, over her daughter’s bier. So this was the cruel end.
His betrothed continued sorrowfully:
“It will break my heart to lose my dear Aunt Verna, even though I shall be the heiress of all her millions!”
She thought it was a good idea to remind him slyly of this fact, but he looked at her coldly.
“You should not be counting on such things, Cora. It sounds mercenary,” he said, rebukingly, while all the while his eyes were taking in the change that had come over her once brilliant beauty—faded like a rose that has languished in the withering heat of an August day.
She looked at him reproachfully:
“Oh, Frank, I did not mean it that way, I love Aunt Verna dearly, and I am praying that she will not die.”
“Is there the slightest hope?”