But Edith neither sobbed nor spoke. She sat perfectly still, with white, drawn face, and with staring, horror-full eyes, that, gazing through the wide-open window, far away into the peaceful evening sky, seemed to see there some terrible vision of doom, unseen of all the others.
“Oh dear! dear!” cried Mrs. Garside, “what a pity it is that you would insist on getting married!”
The words roused Edith from her waking trance. “I thank heaven doubly now that I was enabled to become the wife of Lionel Dering! If—if I must indeed lose him, he will still be mine beyond the grave. Our parting will not be for long. We shall——” She could say no more. She rose hastily, and went to the window, and stood there till her composure had in some measure come back to her.
“You have something more to tell me, Mr. Bristow,” she said, as she went back to her chair after a little while.
“How sorry I am to have distressed you so much!” said Tom, with real feeling.
“Do not speak of that now, please. You have told me the truth, and I am grateful to you for it. I have been living too long in a fool’s paradise.”
“But you must not give way to despair. Dering’s case is by no means a hopeless one, and I should not have said what I have said to you this afternoon, had I not been compelled to do so by another and a most important reason.”
Edith looked at him rather wearily, as if anything that he might now say could have only the faintest possible interest for her.
“As I said before,” resumed Tom, “it is always wise to prepare for the worst, although that worst may possibly never come. And this was the object I had in view, firstly, when I induced you to leave your lodgings in Duxley and come to live in this lonely little house; and, secondly, when I had that piece of furniture made for you which we have just unpacked upstairs.”
Edith’s attention was keen enough now. “You speak in parables!” she said with pitiful eagerness.