Chapter 22 - Page 2

father was so stunned with grief, that Uncle Tom said he seemed to think of nothing but that he could not bear to stay. He went away the very night they laid her here. I suppose," she said slowly, and looking at the mass of white narcissus instead of at him, "I suppose when people love each other, and one dies, the other cannot--cannot----"

Rupert saw that she was unconsciously trying to explain something to herself, and he interposed between her and her thoughts with a hurried effort.

"Yes, yes," he said; "it must be so. When they love each other and one is taken, how can the other bear it?"

Then she lifted her eyes from the flowers to his again, and they looked very large and bright.

"You see," she said, in an unsteady little voice, "I had only been alive a few hours when he went away."

Suddenly the brightness in her eyes welled up and fell in two large crystal drops, though a smile quivered on her lips.

"Don't tell Uncle Tom," she said; "I never let him know that it--it hurts my feelings when I think I had only been alive such a few hours--and there was nobody to care. I must have been so little. If--if there had been no Uncle Tom----"

He knelt down by her side and took her hand in his.

"But there was," he said; "there was!"

"Yes," she answered, her sweet face trembling with emotion; "and, oh! I love him so! I love him so!"

She put her free hand on the earth among the white flowers on the mound.

"And I love her, too," she said; "somehow I know she would not have forgotten me."

"No, no, she would not!" Rupert cried; and they knelt together, hand in hand, looking into each other's eyes as tenderly as children.

"I have been lonelier than you," he said; "I have had nobody."

"Your mother died, too, when you were very young?"

"Yes, Sheba," hesitating a moment. "I will tell you something."

"Yes?"

"Uncle Tom loved her. He left his home partly because he could not stay and see her marry a man who--did not deserve her."

"Did she marry someone like that?" she asked.

His forehead flushed.

"She married my father," he said, "and he was a drunken maniac and broke her heart. I saw it break. When I first remember her, she was a lovely young girl with eyes like a gazelle's--and she cried all their beauty away, and grew tired and old and haggard before I was twelve. He is dead, but I hate him!"

"Oh!" she said; "you have been lonely!"

"I have been something worse than that!" he answered, and the gloom came back to his face. "I have been afraid."