There on that bed they had laid the fainting girl when they had found her by her father's death-bed.
The young wife shivered suddenly. "He died of his unhappy marriage," she had once heard Uncle Henry say--in a low tone, but she had understood him nevertheless.
Mamma did not love him, she had loved another man, and she had told him so once, when they were quarreling about some trifle.
"I should have been happier with the other one--I liked him at any rate, but--he was poor."
Gertrude understood it all now; she had her father's character, she was proud, too. Oh, those gloomy years when she was growing to understand what sunshine was wanting in the house!
"If it were not for the children," he had said once, angrily, "I would have put an end to it long ago."
O what a torture it is when two people are bound together by the law of God and man who would yet gladly put a whole world between them! Unworthy? Immoral?
Had not her father done well when he went voluntarily? But ah, how hard was the going when one loves! How then? Love and esteem belong together--ah, it was imagination, all imagination!
She grew suddenly a shade paler; she thought how her father had loved her and she thought of the little cradle in the attic at home. Thank God, it was only a dream, a wish, a nothing, and yet--Oh, this sickening dread!
She went towards the bed, she was so tired; she nestled her head in the pillow, drew up the coverlid and closed her eyes. And then she seemed to be always seeing and hearing the words that she had written to-day to leave on his writing-table. And she murmured, "Have compassion on me, let me go! Do not follow me, leave me the only place that belongs to me!"
The housekeeper brought some hot milk and she drank it. She would go to sleep, she said, but she could not sleep. She was always listening; she thought she heard horses' hoofs and carriage wheels. Ah, not that, not that!
Hour after hour passed and still she lay motionless; she had no longer the strength to move. Why can one not die when one will?
The noon-day bell was ringing in the village when a carriage drove up and soon after steps came up the stairs.
Uncle Henry put his troubled face in at the door.
"Really," he said, "you are here then! But why, child, why?"