"You will not forget me?" she pleaded. "You will never, never hate me? You
will always love me? You are the only person who has ever made the world
pleasant to me; and you have made it so pleasant! so different from what
it was! a new earth to me! a star! I will come back as soon as this
business will let me. Some day I will come back, never to go away. Oh,
will not that be delightful?"
Her extreme distress, her terror lest she might not return, her
forebodings lest he should some day cease to love her, impressed him for a
moment--only for a truant moment--with doubts as to a mystery. As he left
the railway station, full of gratitude for the last glance of her loving
eyes, he asked himself once or twice, "What is it?"
What was it?
We will follow her. She is ominously sad during the lonely journey: she is
almost stern by the time she arrives in New York. In place of the summer's
sweetness and gayety, there is a wintry and almost icy expression in her
face, as if she were about to encounter trials to which she had been long
accustomed, and which she had learned to bear with hardness if not with
resentment.
No one meets her at the railway station, no one at the door of the sombre
house where her carriage stops--no one until she has passed up stairs into
a darkling parlor.
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