How Elinor lived through the next fortnight she could never have told. She remained as one stunned, and unable to talk to any one. She would lie on the couch for hours and not move, or sit under the canopy of the doorway, her hands lying listlessly in her lap, her sad eyes staring pathetically into space. When spoken to she would arouse herself with a start, and look at her friends with so pitiful an expression in her blue eyes that they would turn away to hide their tears of sympathy. She ate only when urged to do so, and slept only when forced to do so by Tibby.
“If we could only interest her in something,� Alice said over and over, for she scarcely even noticed little Robbie.
At last Lissa came in one day, bringing her herbarium of Nebraska flowers.
“This was a God-send to me,� she said, “when I was brooding over my sorrow. Perhaps I can interest Mrs. Wylie in it.�
“O, how much you have done with it,� cried Tibby, “since the time when you and I made our first botanical excursion together.�
“You drew my attention from the dead to the living, growing things about me, Tibby, dear, and I can never thank you enough,� Lissa replied.
Wonderful as it may seem, Mrs. Wylie did allow herself to become interested in the bright descriptions which Lissa gave her of the native wild flowers of the State, and promised to go with her in the afternoon to gather autumn specimens, and thus the first step was taken in distracting her mind from her grief.
CHAPTER XXVIII
HORACE WYLIE’S PHILOSOPHY
Let us now make a flying trip to the Pacific slope and go back to that hour of parting at San Francisco to learn more of the motives that prompted the tragedy in Elinor Wylie’s life.
Passenger train No. 9, eastward bound, pulled slowly out of the great depot building of the Oakland Mole, and the hurrying and excited throng of people pressed forward, jostling elbows and crowding one another after the manner of travelers, who sometimes leave their politeness and good breeding behind them when they take up their valises.