"Gone!" she repeated, incredulously, still staring at him. "Where is he gone?"
What an awful question! She realized it herself almost the instant it passed her lips. It made her shudder visibly. But she neither screamed nor fainted, nor in any way, except that strange one, betrayed emotion. Instead, she said:
"Be seated, Mr. Mitchell, and excuse me; father is coming." Then she turned and went back up-stairs.
He heard her firm step on the stairs as she went slowly up; and this poor bearer of faithful tidings shut his face into both his hands and groaned aloud for such misery as could not vent itself in any natural way. He understood that there was something more than ordinary sorrow in Ruth's face. It was as if she had been petrified.
Through the days that followed Ruth passed as one in a dream. Everyone was very kind. Her father showed a talent for patience and gentleness that no one had known he possessed.
The girls came to see her; but she would not be seen. She shrank from them. They did not wonder at that; they were half relieved that it was so. Such a pall seemed to them to have settled suddenly over her life that they felt at a loss what to say, how to meet her. So when she sent to them, from her darkened and gloomy room, kind messages of thanks for their kindness, and asked them to further show their sympathy by allowing her to stay utterly alone for awhile, they drew relieved sighs and went away. This much they understood. It was not a time for words.
As for Flossy, she should not have been numbered among them. She did not call at all; she sent by Nellis Mitchell a tiny bouquet of lilies of the valley, lying inside of a cool, broad green lily leaf, and on a slip of paper twisted in with it was written:
"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." How Ruth blessed her for that word! Verily she felt that she was walking through the very blackest of the shadows! It reminded her that she had a friend.
Slowly the hours dragged on. The grand and solemn funeral was planned and the plans carried out. Mr. Wayne was among the very wealthy of the city. His father's mansion was shrouded in its appropriate crape, the rooms and the halls and the rich, dark solemn coffin glittering with its solid silver screws and handles, were almost hidden in rare and costly flowers. Ruth, in the deepest of mourning robes, accompanied by her father, from whose shoulder swept long streamers of crape, sat in the Erskine carriage and followed directly after the hearse, chief mourner in the long and solemn train.
In every conceivable way that love could devise and wealth carry out, were the last tokens of respect paid to the quiet clay that understood not what was passing around it.