"Don't, dear," urged Alice; "tell me the rest some other time."
"No, no!" Mrs. Gorham cried; "you must know it all, and then we need not speak of it again. I had gone over less than half the distance when I came upon them both lying in the trail. I never knew how it happened. He told some one afterward that the horse stumbled. It may have been that; it may have been anything with him in that condition. He had fallen at the side of the trail and was conscious before I left him, but Carina was—dead."
"Don't, don't go on—I can't stand it!" cried Alice.
Eleanor paused as if in response to Alice's appeal, but a glance at her face showed that an emotion stronger than even the words had expressed was holding her in its grip.
"Father was dead, too, when I returned," she said at last, her eyes still gazing into space.
"The excitement killed him?" Alice asked, breathlessly, still further shocked by the double tragedy.
"That and his anxiety over my unexplained absence."
"Your absence?" queried the girl, mystified by Eleanor's apparent incoherency. "Didn't you just say that he was dead when you returned?"
Mrs. Gorham started violently. "What am I saying!" she cried, involuntarily. In a moment she was herself again. "Yes, dear, of course I returned; but not as soon as he expected, and the shock of it all killed him. You understand, don't you? I was very ill, and a friend helped me to a hospital in Denver."
"But you said you had no friends except the man you married," Alice urged, trying to follow the narrative.