“But there, my dear, what does it matter? In the place where I go there’s neither knowledge nor understanding. It will be all the same to me.”
Anne left the sick-room, and from force of habit, wandered out into the garden.
“How lonely! How desolate!” she found herself thinking.
“And I shall be just as lonely, just as desolate when it comes to my turn.”
She turned her face towards the quiet evening sky, in which, despite one or two trembling stars, the flush of sunset still lingered, and again despair fell like a cold hand upon her heart.
All the afternoon she had felt so gay. She had been amused, interested, almost flattered.
Now the words she had just heard, recurred to her. “Tell them to come. You are quite old enough to look after them.”
A sudden miserable sensation of shame assailed her, to remember how young she had felt. In welcoming her visitors, she had not thought of her age at all. She had accepted them as equals and contemporaries.
The blinding tears which made her stumble on the path already dim with twilight, caused her to bow her head with the instinct of hiding them even from herself.