"Don't, Lulu, you silly child! You are always making me cry."
"And I wish I could," she answers. "I am tired of this surface gayety, my liege lady. Oh, I am going to talk plainly! You don't mean it—I know how you suffer, Grace, darling, bravely as you repress it, and I know, too, that you would feel better if you let it all blow over in a great passionate storm—rain! But you won't. You have been living the last few months in a whirl of gayety and pretended pleasure, and damming up the fountain of feeling, till now it is breaking over all your frail barriers of pride and scorn, and you will not give it way, and it is bearing you on its current—where, oh! dearest, where?"
"Hush!" came in a stifled moan, from behind the hands that hid the girlish wife's convulsed face. "You shall not talk so—I cannot bear it!"
"But I must, love," and Lulu's arm stole around the convulsed form that still held itself proudly erect, as if disdaining human help and sympathy. "I must, and you will forgive poor Lulu, for it is her duty, and I must be less your devoted friend than I am if I did not speak. Oh, you know you are not taking the right course to procure oblivion of your sad and grievous troubles! It does not make you happy to whirl through the thoughtless rounds of society amusements and pleasures; it does not make you happy nor contented to dazzle men's eyes and hearts with your inaccessible beauty, when seas are rolling between you and the only man in whose eyes you care to seem fair. Darling, I know when you go back to your silent home your heart sinks heavier by the contrast; I know that when you lay this lovely head upon its pillow you recall, with agony, the time when your baby's cheek was pillowed there against your own——"
"Oh, Heaven!" shuddered the listener, "be silent, Lulu. You will drive me mad. I cannot, cannot bear the least reference to my child! Only just now, as I drove up Main street in my little phaeton, taking a silly sort of triumph to myself at the sensation created by my pretty face and cream-white ponies, I met the funeral of a little child on its way to the cemetery—the casket was covered with lilies and roses—and, oh, Lulu, I thought of my own little one, and its probable fate! and, oh, I wished my heart would break! Why, why does not God let me die!" and, shivering with repressed agony, the young wife suffered Lulu to hold her in her close-clasped arms, while she wept and moaned on her breast.
And Lulu, wise in her young experience, let the saving tears flow on, until Mrs. Winans lifted her head and said, mournfully;
"Oh, Lulu, you should not reproach me for trying to fill up in some way the great blank in my life as best I can! I dare not brood alone over my vacant heart and wretched doom, for I should go mad. I must seek diversion, oblivion!—what would you have me do?"
Lulu's brown eyes lifted to the picture that hung over the lounge.
"Gracie," she said impressively, "is there no other way to fill up your vacant heart and life than by utter abandonment to the pleasures of the social world?"
The listener's eyes followed hers.