"Sorry for me! Is the girl mad?" but again the white eyebrows twitched uneasily.
"I am sorry for you," repeated Queenie, in her clear young voice, "because you are old and lonely; because you have only hard, miserable thoughts to keep you company; because when you are ill no one will comfort you, when you die no one will shed tears over your grave. It must be so dreadful," continued the girl, "not to want love, to be able to do without it. Don't be angry, Mr. Calcott, I am sorry for you; I am indeed."
Not only the eyelids, but the rigid lines of the mouth twitched convulsively, but his only answer was to point to the door; but, as though irresistibly and painfully attracted by this spectacle of loveless old age, Queenie still lingered.
"Emmie never forgets you, sir. She does not love you; how can she? but she still says the prayer mamma taught her—'God bless poor Uncle Andrew.' Now I have seen you I shall ask her never to forget it."
"Leave me," was all his answer; and this time Queenie obeyed him. Had she remained she would have been frightened by the change that came over him. The veins of the forehead were swollen and purple now, the twitching of the mouth increased, a strange numbness seemed creeping over him. That night Mr. Calcott was alarmingly ill.
CHAPTER VII.
LOCKED IN.
"The path my father's foot
Had trod me out (which suddenly broke off
And passed) alone I carried on, and set
My child-heart 'gainst the thorny underwood
To reach the grassy shelter of the trees.
Ah, babe i' the wood, without a brother babe!
My own self pity, like the red-breast bird,
Flies back to cover all that past with leaves."
Aurora Leigh.
As the door of the inhospitable mansion closed behind Queenie she was conscious of a strange feeling of revulsion and weakness, a blank, hopeless depression of mind and body. At the first touch of the keen wintry air she shivered and staggered slightly.
"All this has been too much for me; I wonder if I am ill," she said to herself in a vague, wondering way; and then she remembered that she had eaten nothing since the early morning. Suspense and anxiety had deprived her of appetite, and she had sent away her dinner untasted. "Whatever happens I must keep strong, for Emmie's sake," she thought, and she went into a baker's shop and bought two buns; but as she broke one she remembered that Emmie's sickly appetite had turned that day from the untempting viands placed before her.