And yet what had she desired—but to keep him as her friend? was not this the sum and head of her offending?
'Oh, God, Thou knowest my integrity!' she cried from the depths of her suffering soul.
Alas! was it her fault that she loved him? was it only her fancy that some sympathy, subtle but profound, united them? was it not he who deceived himself? Ah, there was the stab. She knew now that she was nothing to him and he was everything to her.
Her very unconsciousness had prepared this snare for her. She had called him her friend, but it had come to this, that his step was as music in her ear, and the sunshine of his presence had glorified her days. How she had looked for his coming, with what quiet welcoming smiles she had received her friend; his silence had been as sweet to her as his words; the very seat where he sat, the very reels of cotton on her little work-table with which he had played, were as sacred as relics in her eyes.
How she had leant on his counsel; his yea was yea to her, and his nay, nay. How wise and gentle he had ever been with her; once she had been ill, and the tenderness of his sympathy had made her almost love her illness. 'You must get well; we cannot spare you,' he had said to her, and she had thanked him with her sweetest smiles.
How happy they had been in those days: the thought of any change had terrified her; sometimes she had imagined herself twenty years older, but Mildred Lambert still, with a gray-haired friend coming quietly across in the dusk to sit with her and Arnold when all the young ones were gone—her friend, always her friend!
How pitiable had been her self-deception; she must have loved him even then. The thought of Margaret's husband marrying another woman, and that woman the girl that she had cherished as her own daughter, tormented her with a sense of impossibility and pain. Good heavens, what if he deceived himself! What if for the second time in his life he worked out his own disappointment, passion and benevolence leading him equally astray.
Sadness indescribable and profound steeped the soul of this noble woman; pitiful efforts after prayer, wild searching for light, for her lost calmness, for mental resolve and strength, broke the silence of her anguish; but such a struggle could not long continue in one so meek, so ordinarily self-controlled; then came the blessed relief of tears; then, falling on her knees and bowed to the very dust, the poor creature invoked the presence of the Great Sufferer, and laid the burden of her sorrow on the broken heart of her Lord.
One who loved Mildred found, long afterwards, a few lines copied from some book, and marked with a red marginal line, with the date of this night affixed:—
'So out in the night on the wide, wild sea,
When the wind was beating drearily,
And the waters were moaning wearily,
I met with Him who had died for me.'