We were
all needlessly hurried, all nervously expectant of the morrow.
Sir Percival, especially, was too restless now to remain five
minutes together in the same place. That short, sharp cough of
his troubled him more than ever. He was in and out of doors all
day long, and he seemed to grow so inquisitive on a sudden, that
he questioned the very strangers who came on small errands to the
house. Add to all this, the one perpetual thought in Laura's mind
and mine, that we were to part the next day, and the haunting
dread, unexpressed by either of us, and yet ever present to both,
that this deplorable marriage might prove to be the one fatal
error of her life and the one hopeless sorrow of mine. For the
first time in all the years of our close and happy intercourse we
almost avoided looking each other in the face, and we refrained,
by common consent, from speaking together in private through the
whole evening. I can dwell on it no longer. Whatever future
sorrows may be in store for me, I shall always look back on this
twenty-first of December as the most comfortless and most
miserable day of my life.
I am writing these lines in the solitude of my own room, long
after midnight, having just come back from a stolen look at Laura
in her pretty little white bed--the bed she has occupied since the
days of her girlhood.
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