There was awful silence. Cynthia stared, unable to utter a word. She may have doubted the fairness of her mother's version, but the grim picture painted there in the darkness by a woman in seeming readiness to take her own life on account of it fairly chilled her young life's blood. Suddenly a sound broke the outside stillness. There was no mistaking it. It rang out as shrilly on the girl's quaking consciousness as the shriek of a locomotive dashing through a mountain gorge.
“There he is now,” said Mrs. Porter. “Pick up your valise and hurry, hurry to him; but before you go hand me that gun. Before you and he get in that buggy you'll hear my death-knell, and you may know, too, that you fired the shot into the withered breast that nursed you. Go! I'm not keeping you!”
Cynthia swayed visibly in the darkness, and then she sank to her knees and put her head in her mother's lap.
“I won't go,” she groaned, softly. “Mother, I'll do anything you say—anything!”
“Now you are joking, I know,” Mrs. Porter said, harshly.
“No, I mean it—God knows I mean it, mother! Only give me a chance to prove that I mean it. I'll never see him again, if that will suit you—never on earth! I'll stay and nurse you and make you well.”
“If I thought you meant that, Cynthia—Lord, Lord, what a load it would take off of me! Don't—don't say that unless you mean it; the—the joy of saving you would almost kill me.”
“Oh, mother, God knows I mean it!”
“Then”—Mrs. Porter seemed to squeeze her words from her frail body as she stiffly rose to her feet—“then you must let me go, myself, out there and send him off.”
Cynthia, still on her knees, glanced up, her startled eyes wide open.