"I think you always take your own way, Norah," her mistress answers, as she takes the goblet and drains it obediently. "Now, finish my hair, please, and you can go. It is almost eleven o'clock."
Silently Norah obeys, gathering up the shining mass in her hands, and twisting it into a burnished coil at the back of the small head where she confines it with a diminutive silver comb. Then with a wistful sigh, and pitying backward glance, she says good-night and Grace is left alone.
Alone! how cruelly alone! All her life-time now it seems to her she will be thus solitary. She leans her small head back, and stares vacantly at the face whose wondrous beauty is reflected there in the mirror, and a light scornful smile curves her lips as she thinks:
"Is this the form—
That won his praise night and morn?
She thought: my spirit is here alone,
Walks forgotten, and is forlorn."
Rising suddenly she threw up the window and looked out into the night. A gust of cold wind and rain blew into her face. She faced it a moment, then, shutting down the window and dropping the crimson curtains together, passed into her sleeping apartment. But she could not rest. Her downy pillows might have been a bed of thorns. She rose, and gliding across the floor and, pausing one moment in grave irresolution, put her hand on the sliding door of the adjoining nursery, pushed it open and entered by the light that streamed from her own apartment.
All was still and silent here. Shadows lay on everything as heavy as those that clouded her life. She stood gazing mutely around her for an instant; then, with a low, smothered sob of agony, rushed forward, and pushing up the sweeping Valenciennes canopy of the rosewood crib that stood in the center of the room, buried her face in the small pillow that still held the impress of a baby's head.
Then silence fell. Some women carry beneath a calm, perhaps smiling, face, a deeper pain than was ever clothed in words or tears. The acme of human suffering crushes, paralyzes some hearts into terrible silence. It was thus with Grace. Her sorrow had sunk to the bottom of the sea of anguish, so deep that not a ripple on the surface, not a sparkling drop, leaped up to show where it fell.
Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes went by. She lifted her face at last—as white and chill as that of the dead, but lighted by
"Melancholy eyes divine,
The home of woe without a tear."