“Dad gave it to me,” she answered. “He always promised me a satin dress, and so last Christmas he sent and got the satin. I made it. This is the first time I have worn it before any one.”
She spoke as though the words were choking her. She seemed to be nerving herself for something unusual. She was.
“Tell me,” she cried, almost fiercely, “tell me honestly, am I beautiful?”
He tried not to do it. He felt like a cur, a second afterwards, for having done it. But he could not help it, do what he could to control himself. He laughed aloud.
“O don’t—don’t—don’t——” she almost screamed. Then she fell on the floor in a green and red heap and wept. Jack had seen women weep before (a number of them had wept at different times when he had come to say “good by”), but never before had he seen such a torrent of tears as this. There was no stemming it, though he tried very hard. It seemed an age before it ceased, and then it seemed another age that she sat there motionless with her face in her hands as though she was trying to hide it. He felt horribly nervous. It took him sixteen matches, as he afterwards said, to smoke one pipe. Finally she broke the silence. Her voice was calm enough as she asked:
“What is a beautiful woman like?”
He did not answer in words. It was just a little hard to speak at all. He unbuttoned his blouse and took from the inside pocket a photograph and handed it to her. She held it fiercely in her two great rough hands and gazed at it steadily for a long time. Poor woman, she learned what beauty was, and she learned of the love of this man whom she worshiped. Then she got up, handed back the photograph to its owner and walked silently and slowly from the room.
It was hard for Jack Harding to sleep that night. He got into a fitful slumber along towards morning, and he had not been sleeping for an hour when he found himself standing awake in the middle of the room feeling for his revolver in the gray light of the early dawn.
“Nothing but a shot could wake me like that,” he said to himself, and hastily pulling on his clothes and taking his revolver in his hand he went through the house. The fire had been built and breakfast, already cooked, was waiting for him. “I guess Sis didn’t sleep much either,” he thought. He knocked at her door but received no answer. “Milking the cow, I guess,” he thought, but there was beginning to be a horrible dread in his heart. He ran hastily out of the house, and there—there under his own window lay Sis, again a green and red heap, but there was red on the dress now that was not ribbon. She had shot herself in the breast. He ran to her and picked her up. He carried her into the house and swore at himself for never having had the energy to study a little surgery in all the long years of his army idleness. Presently she revived a little and he heard her murmur faintly: “Tell dad good by—tell him I can’t help him any longer.”
“Oh, Sis!” he pleaded, “why did you do this?”