"Spring will come again," she said; "but death and parting and loss—they are so dreadful! And growing old! Oh, Percival, why must they all be?"
He shrugged his shoulders: "The whole world echoes your 'Why?' Sissy, I wish I could help you, but I can't. I can only tell you that I understand what you feel. It is very terrible looking forward to age—to loss of powers, hopes and friends. One feels sometimes as if one could not tread that long gray road to the grave."
Sissy shivered, as if she saw it drawn out before her eyes.
"But after all it may be brighter than we think," he went on after a pause. "There is joy and beauty in change, as well as bitterness. If everything in the world were fixed and unalterable, would not that be far more terrible? As it is, we have all the possibilities on our side. Who knows what gladness may grow out of endless change?" Yet even as he spoke he was conscious of a wild, impotent longing to snatch her—she was so delicate and sweet—from beneath the great revolving wheels of time, with a cry of
Stay as you are, and be loved for ever.
But the poet's very words carry the sentence of doom in the memory that the blossom to which they were uttered must have perished years ago.
"Sissy," he said suddenly, "surely there cannot be much suffering reserved for you. Oh, poor child! I wish I could take it all in your place." He spoke in all earnestness, yet could he have looked into the future he would have seen that her suffering would not be long, but very keen, and his not to bear, but to inflict.
CHAPTER XI.
MEANWHILE.
Percival Thorne had never thought much on the subject of revenge. He rather took it for granted that deliberate revenge was an extraordinary and altogether exceptional thing. People give way to bursts of passion which pass away and leave no trace: they are so hot with fury which comes to nothing at all that at the first glance it seems as if the anger which bears fruit must be something different in kind. But it is possible that if Percival had considered the matter he might have arrived at the conclusion that revenge does not depend only on intensity of passion, but on intensity of passion and aptness of opportunity together. Disembodied hate soon dies unless it is fiendish in its strength.