The Fairy Wife - Page 2

she could not occupy him! The painful truth came slowly over her, as the deepening shadows fall upon a sunny Day, until at last it is Night: Night with her stars of infinite beauty, but without the lustre and warmth of Day.

She drooped; and on her couch of sickness her keen-sighted love perceived, through all his ineffable tenderness, that same remoteness in his eyes, which proved that, even as he sat there grieving and apparently absorbed in her, there still came dim remembrances of Care to vex and occupy his soul.

"It were better I were dead," she thought; "I am not good enough for him."

Poor child! Not good enough, because her simple nature knew not the manifold perplexities, the hindrances of incomplete life! Not good enough, because her whole life was scattered!

And so she breathed herself away, and left her husband to all his gloom of Care, made tenfold darker by the absence of those gleams of tenderness which before had fitfully irradiated life. The night was starless, and he alone.