"At any rate, I can die rather more slowly on it, and that will be convenient just now."
"Why don't you wait, and see if we can't help you to something better?"
Percival shook his head: "No. I promised Sissy that if I took help from any one, it should be from her. I must try to stand by myself first."
Godfrey wrote, and Percival sat with bent head, poring over the little note which Sissy had sent to entreat that the past might be forgotten. "Let me do something for you," she wrote. "Come back to me, Percival, if you have forgiven me; and you said you had. I was so miserable that miserable night, and we were so hurried, I hardly know what I said or did. It was like a bad dream: let us forget it, and wake up and begin again. Can't we? Come and be good to me, as you were last autumn. You remember your song that day in the garden, 'You would die ere I should grieve;' and I have grieved so bitterly since last Wednesday night! You will be good to me—won't you?—and I promise I will tell you everything always. I promise, Percival, and you know I will really when I say I promise."
He had answered her with tender and sorrowful firmness. "I knew your letter was coming," he said. "I was as certain of it, and of what you would say, as if I held it in my hand. But, Sissy, you wouldn't have written so to me if I had been a rich man, as you hoped I should be; and I can't take from your sweet pity what you couldn't give me when I asked it for love's sake. It is impossible, dear, but I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I love you for it. I hardly know yet where I shall go and what I shall do; but if I should want any help I will ask it first of you, and I will be your friend and brother to my dying day."
Thus he closed the page of his life on which he had written that brief story of love. Yet Sissy's letter was an inexpressible comfort to him. It was something to know that elsewhere a little heart was beating—so true and kind that it would have given up its own happiness—to help him in his trouble.
A few days later Percival was going north in a slow train. On his right sat a stout man with his luggage tied up in a dirty handkerchief. On his left was an old woman in rusty black nursing an unpleasant grandchild, who made hideous demonstrations of friendship to young Thorne. Opposite was a soldier smoking vile tobacco, a clodhopping boy in corduroy, and a big girl whose tawdry finery was a miracle of jarring and vulgar colors.
Never, I think, could a young hero have set forth to make his way through the world with less hope than did Percival Thorne. He was already disheartened and disgusted, and questioned within himself whether life were worth having for those who went third-class. The slow train and the lagging hours crawled onward through the dust and heat. "And this," he thought, "should have been my wedding-day!"