“Ah!” she sighed, “we are always travelling. My father is the modern Wandering Jew, I think. Our movements are always sudden, and our journeys always long ones—from one end of Europe to the other very often.”
“You seem tired of it!” I remarked.
“Tired!” she gasped, her voice changing. “Ah! if you only knew how I long for peace, for rest—for home!” and she sighed.
“Where is your home?”
“Anywhere, now-a-days,” was her rather despondent reply. “We are wanderers. We lived in England once—but, alas! that is now all of the past. My father is compelled to travel, and I must, of necessity, go with him. I am afraid,” she added quickly, “that I bore you with this chronicle of my own troubles. I really ought not to say this—to you, a stranger,” she said, with a low, nervous little laugh.
“Though I may be a stranger, yet, surely, I may become your friend,” I remarked, looking into her beautiful face, half concealed by the blue wrap.
For a moment she hesitated; then, halting in the gravelled path and looking at me, she replied very seriously—
“No; please do not speak of that again.”
“Why not?”
“Well—only because you must not become my friend.”