"I love Dolly," was the quiet answer. "She is often very foolish, sometimes very trying, always disappointing and unsatisfying; but I shall love her to the end."
When Miss Trebasson set her foot down upon such a sentence as the foregoing, Mrs. Trebasson understood further expostulation was useless, and so the offensive letter smouldered into ashes, and the bride elect tried to forget its contents as she had too readily, perhaps, forgiven them.
Fortunately for all concerned Dolly was unable to be present at her friend's wedding, and Mortomley gladly enough made the state of his wife's health a plea for excusing his own attendance.
Owing either to her own folly, or to some remoter cause with which this story has no concern, Mrs. Mortomley was, at that period, having an extremely hard fight for life. She had been happy with her child—that Lenore of whom Mr. Kleinwort made mention—for a couple of days. Every one was satisfied, husband, doctor, nurse; and then suddenly there came a reaction, and Dolly hung between life and death, insensible to the reality of either.
When Mrs. Werner, after her wedding tour, drove over and visited her friend, she found outwardly a very different Dolly to that photographed in her memory.
A pale weak woman, with hair cut short and softly curling round her temples; a creature with transparent hands; dark eyes looking eagerly and anxiously out of a white sunken face; the Dolly of old; but Dolly as she might have looked had she gone to heaven and come back again to earth; Dolly etherealised, and with a beauty of delicacy strange as it was new—but Dolly unchanged mentally.
With a feeling of surprise and regret Mrs. Werner confessed to herself that not even the fact of having set her feet in the valley of the shadow, and being brought back into the sunshine, almost by a miracle, had altered her friend.
The want there had been in Dolly before her marriage still remained unsupplied.
"I wonder what would really change her," thought Mrs. Werner looking at the poor wan cheeks, at the wasted figure, at the feeble woman too weak to hold her child in her arms and coo soft tender nothings in its ear.
One day Mrs. Werner was to understand; but before that day arrived she was destined to see many changes in Dolly.