“Miss Sheila!” cried the girl, looking up to her friend’s face with a sudden fright seizing her heart, “what is the matter with you? You are going to die!”
“There is nothing the matter, Mairi. I am going away.”
She uttered the words placidly, but there was a pained look about the lips that could not be concealed, and her face, unknown to herself, had the whiteness of despair in it.
“Going away!” said Mairi, in a bewildered way. “Where are you going, Miss Sheila?”
“I will tell you by and by. Get your trunk ready, Mairi. You are keeping me waiting.”
Then she called for a servant, who was sent for a cab; and by the time the vehicle appeared Mairi was ready to get into it, and her trunk was put on the top. Then, clad in the rough blue dress she used to wear in Borva, and with no appearance of haste or fear in the calm and death-like face, Sheila came out from her husband’s house and found herself alone in the world. There were two little girls, the daughters of a neighbor, passing by at the time; she patted them on the head and bade them good-morning. Could she recollect, five minutes thereafter, having seen them? There was a strange and distant look in her eyes.
She got into the cab, and sat down by Mairi, and then took the girl’s hand. “I am sorry to take you away, Mairi,” she said; but she was apparently not thinking of Mairi, nor of the house she was leaving, nor yet of the vehicle in which she was so strangely placed. Was she thinking of a certain wild and wet day in the far Hebrides, when a young bride stood on the decks of a great vessel and saw the home of her childhood and the friends of her youth fade back into the desolate waste of the sea? Perhaps there may have been some unconscious influence in this picture to direct her movements at this moment, for of definite resolves she had none. When Mairi told her that the cabman wanted to know whither he was to drive, she merely answered: “Oh, yes, Mairi, we will go to the station;” and Mairi added, addressing the man: “It was the Euston Station.” Then they drove away.
“Are you going home?” said the young girl, looking up with a strange foreboding and sinking of the heart to the pale face and distant eyes—“are you going home, Miss Sheila?”
“Oh, yes, we are going home, Mairi,” was the answer she got, but the tone in which it was uttered filled her mind with doubt, and something like despair.