The leaves fall together over the sorrowful, girlish rhyme, the book drops from her hand, and, sighing, she throws herself down on a low divan of cushioned pale blue silk, looking idly out of the open window at the evening sky glowing with the opalescent hues of a summer's sunset.
"I daresay it's quite natural to make a dunce of one's self once in a life-time," she muses, "and I presume there is a practical era in every one's life. All the same I wish it had never come to me; the consequences have followed me through life."
Her small hand goes up to her throat, touching the spring of the pearl-studded locket she wears there. The lid flying open shows the dusk glory of Paul Winans' pictured face smiling on her through a mist of her own tears.
"And I drove you from me. Lulu says I did it; spoke my own doom with fever-parched, delirious lips! Why did they believe me? Why did they not tell me of it long ago? They should have known I could not have been so cruel! All this time you have thought I hated you, all this time I have thought you hated me! You did come; you did want to make peace with your wronged though willful wife. It is joy to know that though too late for hope even. Why did I go to Washington? Why did I go in defiance of his will? All might have been well with us ere this. Both of them—the darling baby and the darling father—might have been mine now. Instead—oh, Heaven, Paul dearest, you will never know now—unless, perchance, you are in heaven—how deeply, how devotedly I loved you! Who is to blame? Ah, me! It is all rue!"
A moment her lips trembled against the pictured face, then she shuts it with a snap, and lies with closed eyes and compressed lips, thinking deeply and intensely, as "hearts too much alone" always think. But with the passing moments her sudden heart-ache softens a little. Rousing herself she walks over to the window, saying, with a faint, fluttering sigh:
"Ah, well! 'Fate is above us all.'"
How sweet the air is! The salt breeze catches the odor of the mignonette in her window, and wafts it to her, lifting the soft tresses from her aching temples with its scented breath, and with the sublime association that there is in some faint flower perfumes and grief, the bitter leaven at her heart swells again with all the painful luxury of sorrow.
"I am so weary of it all—life's daily treadmill round! What is it worth? How is it endurable when love is lost to us?"
Ah! poor child! Love is not all of life. When love is lost life's cares and duties still remain. We must endure it. Well for us that God's love is over all.