Kneeling on the floor in the bedroom, her hands clasped round Grace's knees as she sat, Adela sobbed out her repentance, her hopeless longings for the life and the husband she had thrown away.
"Poor child!" sighed Grace, her own tears falling as she stroked with a gentle hand her unhappy sister's hair, "your sorrow is, I see, hard to bear. If I only knew how to comfort you!"
No answer.
"Still, Adela, although he is yet, in one sense of the word, your husband, it is not well for you to indulge these thoughts; these regrets. Were there even the most distant hope that things between you would alter, it would be different; but I fear there is none."
"I know it," bewailed Adela. "What he did, he did for ever."
"Then you should no longer, for your own peace' sake, dwell upon his memory. Try and forget him. It seems curious advice, Adela, but I have none better to give."
"I cannot forget him. My dreams by night, my thoughts by day, are of him, of him alone. If I could only be with him for just one week of reconciliation, to show him how I would, if possible, atone to him, to let him see that my repentance is lasting, though he put me away again at the week's end, it would be something. Oh, Grace, you don't know what my remorse is—how hard a cross I have to bear."
She knelt there in her bitter distress. Not much less distressing was it to Grace. By dint of coaxing, Adela was at length partially calmed, and lay back, half-exhausted, in an easy-chair.
At lunch-time, for this had occurred in the morning, she refused to go down, or to take anything. In the afternoon, when Grace was back again, Darvy brought up a cup of chocolate and some toast. Whilst languidly taking this, Adela abruptly renewed the subject: the only one, as she truly said, that ever occupied her mind.
"Do you see him often, Grace?"