“My heart aches for your sorrow, dear, and although we are strangers to each other, I long to comfort you. Confide in me, and perhaps I can help you. Is it a question of lack of means? Or, sadder still, of—love?”
“Of love!” burst out Cinthia; and she dropped her head on that silken shoulder in a passionate outburst of tears, won in spite of herself by the divine art of sympathy.
And then, since both were strangely, magnetically attracted to each other, it was not hard for her to draw from Cinthia the brief, sad story of her life and love down to the very moment when she had opened the door to fly out into the street with the half-formed plan of suicide yet in her mind.
Oh, what a pathetic, moving story it was! And how it touched the listener’s tender heart, moving her to tears!
She could sympathize with all that Cinthia told her, and could share in her resentment against her unloving father, her strict aunt, and the lover whose affection had not been proof against the schemes of his proud mother. To her eyes, as to Cinthia’s, it all looked as if Mrs. Varian and Everard Dawn had made of the hapless lovers a sacrifice to a family feud vaguely hinted at in the lady’s confession to Cinthia, that her mother had been her bitterest enemy and was unforgiven in her grave.
With all her heart she espoused Cinthia’s side, and freely expressed contempt for Arthur’s part in the girl’s sorrow.
“He has acted the part of a coward, forsaking you thus at the command of his haughty mother, and I would think no more of him, dear, for he is not worth it,” she exclaimed, warmly.
Cinthia only sighed. She did not believe now that she could ever put Arthur out of her thoughts.
In spite of his seeming injustice to her, and the humiliation he had put upon her, something in her heart vaguely pleaded in his defense—perhaps his illness and pallor, and the keen anguish of his voice when he had said to her so sadly that they must bid each other an eternal farewell.
There had been something solemn, even tragic, in that parting, almost like the farewell of death. Resentment did not have any part in its supreme despair. It was rather