"Thank God," said Lady softly. And Sheila answered from the other side: "The Saints be praised."
She sat very quietly for a little time, looking about her. Lady had wiped the water from her face, and she seemed her natural self again, the girlish color returning to her cheeks and a certain bird-like vivacity in her whole pose. Then, as if memory of a sudden returned to her, she crumpled over, hiding her tragic little face in her hands. She began to cry softly at first in little sobbing, heart-broken gasps, which took on gradually a wailing intensity very dreadful to hear.
"Oh, my dear, my dear, my dear!" she repeated over and over again, in a desolate and ceaseless iteration that grew into a horror and which alone we dared not stop. Doctor Paulus, we knew, must be within call and listening. I think that all of us wondered why he did not return; we resented this permitted continuance of suffering. Finally it was Lady who made the first move among us.
She dropped on her knees beside her mother, putting her arm tenderly about the convulsed little form, and pressing her cheek close against her mother's own. "Mother, dear," she whispered very softly.
A pause came in Mrs. Tabor's sobbing and she stretched one hand half as if to push Lady away, half as if to hold her as something real and tangible.
"Where is the doctor?" she asked.
Evidently Doctor Paulus had been listening, for at the murmured question he stepped in and came across the room to Mrs. Tabor. She faced him shrinkingly, but nerved herself for the question.
"Why have you taken her from me?" she asked brokenly, at last.
Doctor Paulus' face was very kind and very serious.
"I know that now it seems so," he answered, "but all that will for you pass away. It is not that we have taken the daughter that is dead away. For you see now, and you will understand how all that came only out of yourself, like a picture that you made of your own sorrow. It was in a circle, how you made by grieving this grief like a thing from outside coming to make you grieve the more. A circle that seems as well to begin at one point as at another, is it not so? And this cruel light so suddenly has made you see the true beginning. So now it is all gone because you have known that it was never there at all." He moved his broad hands suddenly as one waving away smoke. "There is not any longer for you that other world which never was, which was a burden and a trouble always to you because it was made out of trouble. But this good world you have again, and of that only the good part, all your dear ones here truly returned because that evil nothing is gone from between. Is it not so?"