In her secret despair, she longed for death; but it would not come at her call.
She was young, beautiful, and possessed of superb health, besides an overweening pride that would not permit her to pine away and die for a faithless lover who had fled with so contemptible a rival.
She looked piteously at the old doctor, exclaiming:
“I would rather return to my teacher’s desk in New York, and to a life of poverty and toil, than remain here in luxury as the wife of a man I do not love.”
“I believe you, my dear young lady; but you are hedged in by circumstances you cannot break through. The condition of the man you have married appeals to your pity, if not your heart.”
“Yes,” she assented sadly; and he continued:
“If you turned against him now you would, by the shock of your desertion, destroy his slight chance of life. Can you bear to do it?”
“And if he lives,” she said, “I am bound for life to a man I cannot love.”
He shrank before the despair in her eyes, not knowing how to urge her further, and for a moment there was a blank silence.
The next moment something happened that turned the wavering scales in Royall Sherwood’s favor. The sick nurse came to the door, saying: