“To die!” exclaimed the girl, in horror.
“Yes,” said Mr. Davis, “to die; she looked as if she could not live many days longer. I begged her to let me see that she was provided for, but she said that she was going to find her way back to her old home, somewhere far off in the country, and she would hear of nothing else. She would not tell the name of the place, nor her own name, but she left a letter for Arthur, and begged me to find him and give it to him, so that he might come and speak to her once if he cared to do so. She begged me to forgive her for the trouble she had caused me, and to pray that God would forgive her too; and then she bade me farewell and dragged herself away.”
Mr. Davis stopped, and Helen sat for a long time staring ahead of her, with a very frightened look in her eyes, and thinking, “Oh, we MUST find Arthur!” Then she turned to her father, her lips trembling and her countenance very pale. “Tell me,” she said, in a low, awe-stricken voice, “a long time ago someone must have wronged that woman.”
“Yes, dear,” said Mr. Davis, “when she was not even as old as you are. And the man who wronged her was worth millions of dollars, Helen, and could have saved her from all her suffering with a few of them if he cared to. No one but God knows his name, for the woman would not tell it.”
Helen sat for a moment or two staring at him wildly; and then suddenly she buried her head in his bosom and burst into tears, sobbing so cruelly that her father was sorry he had told her what he had. He knew why that story moved her so, and it wrung his heart to think of it,—that this child of his had put upon her own shoulders some of that burden of the guilt of things, and must suffer beneath it, perhaps for the rest of her days.
When Helen gazed up at him again there was the old frightened look upon her face, and all his attempts to comfort her were useless. “No, no!” she whispered. “No, father! I cannot even think of peace again, until we have found Arthur!”
Freundliches Voglein!