"I shall live through it, Dorrie," she had said to her sister, in those early days of misery, "and, God helping me, it shall not make me bitter; but it has robbed me of my youth. One cannot suffer in this way, and keep young;" and she was right.
"If you could only hate him!" ejaculated Doreen. "In your circumstances I know I should loathe and despise him." But Althea only shook her head.
"How could I hate him, when I have grown to love him with my whole heart, when I have regarded myself as his." But here she stopped and hid her face in her hands, with a choking sob. "Oh, Dorrie, that is the worst of all, that I should have believed it, and that he never meant it; that he never really loved me."
"I think he was very fond of you, Althea," returned Doreen, eagerly. "Mother was saying so only last night."
"Yes, he was fond of me. We were friends; but I was not his closest and dearest. Dorrie, we must never talk of this again, you and I; a wound like this, so sore and deep, should be covered up and hidden. I must hide it even from myself. There is only one thing that I want to say, and then we will bury our dead. I cannot hate Everard—hatred is not in my nature—and neither can I ever cease to love him. Oh, there is no need for you to look so shocked"—as Doreen's face expressed strong disapproval of this. "There will be no impropriety in the love I shall bear him. If I could I would be his guardian angel, and keep all troubles from him." Then she sighed and put her hand gently on her sister's shoulder. "'Seek not much rest, but much patience;' that shall be my New Year's motto. We will bury our dead." Those had been her words, and for twenty years the grass had grown over that grave; and yet, on this September night, the ghost of her old love had haunted her, and the ache of the old pain had made itself felt.
Is there any grave deep enough to bury a woman's love? Althea Harford was nearly forty-one, and yet the memory of Everard Ward, with his perfect face, and boyish, winning ways, his gay insouciance, and light-hearted mirth, made her heart throb with quickened beats of pain. All these years—these weary years—she had never met any one like him—never any one whom she could compare with him. People had often told her that he was not specially clever, that his talents were by no means of a first-class order; but she had never believed them. To her fond fancy he was the embodiment of every manly gift and beauty; even Dorothy, with all her love for her husband, would have marvelled at Althea's infatuation.
And now Everard's daughter was under her roof, and the knowledge that this was so had driven the sleep from her eyes, and filled her with a strange restlessness. Waveney's smile, and the turn of her head, and something in her voice, recalled Everard. More than once that evening she had winced, as some familiar tone brought him too vividly before her.
Waveney's artless confidence had given her food for thought. She had long known the hard fight that Everard Ward was waging, in his attempts to keep the wolf from the door. On more than one occasion her secret beneficence had lightened his weight of care. If Everard had guessed who was the real purchaser of some of his pictures, he would not have pocketed the money quite so happily; but Althea kept her own counsel.
"If I could only be his guardian angel!" she had said, in her girlish misery; and no purer wish had ever been expressed by woman's lips; in some ways she had been Everard Ward's good angel all these years.
Still she had never realised the extent of his poverty until Waveney had told her about the purchase of "King Canute."