Notwithstanding all the elasticity of youth, life became an inexpressibly
dull thing to Louie as the year wore into the next--dull, with neither aim
nor object, the past a pain to remember, the future a blank to consider.
She could live only from day to day, one day like another, till they grew
so wearisome she wondered her hair was not gray--the pretty hair that,
shorn from her head in her illness, had grown again in a short fleece of
silky curls--for it seemed to her that she had lived a hundred years. And
because troubles never come alone, and one perhaps makes the other seem
lighter and better to be borne, in the thick of a long winter's storm they
brought home her father, the old fisherman, drowned and dead.
Captain Traverse knew of the old fisherman's death through the newspapers
that found him in his foreign ports--not through Miss Frarnie's letters,
for she knew almost nothing of the existence or non-existence of such low
people; and therefore, conjecture as he needs must concerning Louie's
means of livelihood now, there was no intelligence to relieve any anxiety
he might have felt, or to inform him of the sale of the cottage to pay the
debt of the mortgage under which it was bought, or of the support that
Louie earned in helping her aunt watch with the sick and lay out the dead:
he could only be pricked with knowledge of the fact that he had no right
to his anxiety, or to the mention of her name even in his prayers--if he
said them.
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