It was not a long illness, Louie's, though it had been severe enough to
destroy for her consciousness both of pain and pleasure. Her aunt had left
other work and had nursed her through it; but when, strong and well once
more, she went about her old duties, it seemed to her that that
consciousness had never returned: she took up life with utter listlessness
and indifference, and she fancied that her love for Andrew was as dead as
all the rest. The poor little thing, laying this flattering unction to
heart, did not call much reason to her aid, or she would have known that
there was some meaning in it when she cried all day on coming across an
old daguerreotype of Andrew. "It isn't for love of him," she sobbed. "It's
for the loss of all that love out of my life that was heaven to me. Oh no,
no! I love him no longer: I can't, I can't love him: he is all the same as
another woman's husband." But, despite this stout assertion, she could not
bring herself to part with that picture: he was not in reality quite the
husband of another woman, and till he was indeed she meant to keep it. "He
is only promised to her yet, and he was promised first to me," she said
for salve to conscience; and meanwhile the picture grew so blurred with
conscious tears, and perhaps with unconscious kisses, that it might have
been his or another's: Miss Frarnie herself, had she seen it, could not
have told whose it was.
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