It is so easy when one is old, and the pulses are sluggish, and the hot passions of youth are quelled, it is so easy then to learn that lesson of waiting; but when we are young, and our best days slipping away, and life's hopes all before us, and life's burdens well-nigh unbearable; then it is that it is hard, that waiting in itself becomes terrible—more terrible almost than the worst of our woes.
So wearily, feverishly, impatiently enough, Vera waited.
Winter died away into spring. The rough wind of March, worn out with its own boisterous passions, sobbed itself to rest like a tired child, and little green buds came cropping up sparsely and timidly out of the brown bosom of the earth; and, presently, all the glory of the golden crocuses unfolded itself in long golden lines in the vicarage garden; and there were twittering of birds and flutterings of soft breezes among the tree-tops, and a voice seemed to go forth over the face of the earth. The winter is over, and summer is nigh at hand.
And then it came to her at last. An envelope by the side of her plate at breakfast; a few scrawled words in a handwriting she had never seen before, and yet identified with an unfailing instinct, ere even she broke the seal. One minute of wild hope, to be followed by a sick, chill numbness, and the story of her love and its longings shrank away into the despair of impossibility.
How small a thing to make so great a misery! What a few words to make a wilderness of a human life!
"Her grandfather is dead, and she has claimed me. Good-bye; forget me and forgive me."
That was all; nothing more. No passionate regrets, no unavailing self-pity; nothing to tell her what it cost him to resign her; no word to comfort her for the hopelessness of his desertion; nothing but those two lines.
There was a chattering going on at the table around her. Tommy was clamouring for bread and butter; the vicar was reading out the telegrams from the seat of war; Marion was complaining that the butter was not good; the maid-servant was bringing in the hot bacon and eggs—it all went on like a dream around her; presently, like a voice out of a fog, somebody spoke to her:
"Vera, are you not feeling well? You look as if you were going to faint."
And then she crunched the letter in her hand and recalled herself to life.