But it did not, nor the next day, nor the next.  On the fourth day her heart felt like to break.

I think, of all pains not mortal, few are worse than this small silent agony of waiting for the post; letting all the day’s hope climax upon a single minute, which passes by, and the hope with it, and then comes another day of dumb endurance, if not despair.  This even with ordinary letters upon which any thing of moment depends.  With others, such as this letter of Robert Roy’s—­let us not speak of it.  Some may imagine, others may have known, a similar suspense.  They will understand why, long years afterward, Fortune Williams was heard to say, with a quiver of the lip that could have told its bitter tale, “No; when I have a letter to write, I never put off writing it for single day.”

As these days wore on—­these cruel days, never remembered without a shiver of pain, and of wonder that she could have lived through them at all—­the whole fabric of reasons, arguments, excuses, that she had built up, for him and herself, gradually crumbled away.  Had she altogether misapprehended the purport of his promised letter?  Was it just some ordinary note, about her boys and their studies perhaps, which, after all, he had not thought it worthwhile to write?  Yet surely it was worth while, if only to send a kindly and courteous farewell to a friend, after so close an intimacy and in face of so indefinite a separation.

A friend?  Only a friend?  Words may deceive, eyes seldom can.  And there had been love in his eyes.  Not mere liking, but actual love.  She had seen it, felt it, with that almost unerring instinct that women have, whether they return the love or not.  In the latter case, they seldom doubt it; in the former, they often do.

“Could I have been mistaken?” she thought, with a burning pang of shame.  “Oh, why did he not speak—­just one word?  After that, I could have borne any thing.”

But he had not spoken, had not written.  He had let himself drop out of her life as completely as a falling star drops out of the sky, a ship sinks down in mid-ocean, or—­any other poetical simile, used under such circumstances by romantic people.

Fortune Williams was not romantic; at least, what romance was in her lay deep down, and came out in act rather than word.  She neither wept nor raved nor cultivated any external signs of a breaking heart.  A little paler she grew, a little quieter, but nobody observed this:  indeed, it came to be one of her deepest causes of thankfulness that there was nobody to observe any thing—­that she had no living soul belonging to her, neither father, mother, brother, nor sister, to pity her or to blame him; since to think him either blamable or blamed would have been the sharpest torture she could have known.