"I should not have brought my gloomy face here to sadden you still more—forgive me for my reckless outburst," said he, pained by the sight of her womanly grief, which always goes to a man's heart.
"Do not regret it," she answered, through her sobs. "Let me grieve with you, poor boy, in your trouble. Believe me, sympathy is very sweet."
"Thank you," he answered, gently. "Ah! this indeed is a house of mourning. Is Ada any better to-day, Mrs. Vance?"
"I am sorry to say she is not," answered the lady, making a pretence of drying her eyes, which, however, had not been wet by a single tear. "She has a low, intermittent fever, which does not as yet yield at all to the physician's treatment. God grant we are not to lose our lovely Ada, too. Ah! that would indeed be a sad consequence of poor Lily's rash suicide."
He shuddered through all his strong young frame at that concluding word.
"Oh, God!" he groaned, "the mystery of it! Suicide! Suicide! If God had taken her from us, I could learn to say, 'It is well'—but that she should weary of us all, that she should rush out of this life that I thought to make so fair and beautiful to her in our united future! I cannot understand it—it is horrible, maddening!"
Musingly she murmured over a few lines from Tom Hood's mournful poem, "The Bridge of Sighs:"
"Mad from Life's history,
Swift to Death's mystery,
Glad to be hurled
Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world!"
The words seemed to madden him. Impatiently he strode up and down the floor.
"She never loved me as I loved her!" he broke out, passionately. "I could not have done aught to grieve her so. If earth had been a desert, it must still have been Paradise to me while she walked upon it. Oh! Lily, Lily, you were very cruel!"