Added to bereavement, desertion, loneliness, slander, ingratitude, had come this little bit of insolence to overthrow the firmness that had stood all the rest.  And Berenice wept.

She had left home, friends, and country for one who repaid the sacrifice by leaving her.  She had lavished her wealth upon those who received her bounty with suspicion and repaid her kindness with ingratitude.  She had lived a life as blameless and as beneficent as that of any old time saint or martyr, and had won by it nothing but detraction and calumny.  Her parents were dead, her husband gone, her native land far away, her hopes were crushed.  No wonder she wept.  And then the countess was out of her sphere; as much out of her sphere in the woods of Maryland as Hans Christian Andersen’s cygnet was in the barnyard full of fowls.  She was a swan, and they took her for a deformed duck.  And at last she herself began to be vaguely conscious of this.

“Why do I remain here?” she moaned; “what strange magnetic power is it that holds my very will, fettered here, against my reason and judgment?  That has so held me for long years?  Yes, for long, weary years have I been bound to this cross, and I am not dead yet!  Heavenly Powers! what are my nerves and brain and heart made of that I am not dead, or mad, or criminal before this?  Steel, and rock, and gutta percha, I think!  Not mere flesh and blood and bone like other women’s?  Oh, why do I stay here?  Why do I not go home?  I have lost everything else; but I have still a home and country left!  Oh, that I could break loose!  Oh, that I could free myself!  Oh, that I had the wings of a dove, for then I would fly away and be at rest!’” she exclaimed, breaking into the pathetic language of the Psalmist.

A voice softly stole upon her ear, a low, plaintive voice singing a homely Scotch song: 

  “’Oh, it’s hame, hame, hame,
  Hame fain would I be;
  But the wearie never win back
  To their ain countrie.’”

Tears sprang again to the eyes of the countess as she caught up and murmured the last two lines: 

  “’But the wearie never win back
  To their ain countrie.’”

Phoebe, for it was she who was singing, hushed her song as she reached her lady’s door, and knocked softly.  The countess unlocked the door to admit her.

“It is only the mail bag, my lady, that old Jovial has just brought from the post office,” said the girl.

Lady Hurstmonceux listlessly looked over its contents.  Several years of disappointment had worn out all expectation of hearing from the only one of whom she cared to receive news.  There were home and foreign newspapers that she threw carelessly out.  And there was one letter at the bottom of all the rest that she lifted up and looked at with languid curiosity.  But as soon as her eyes fell upon the handwriting of the superscription the letter dropped from her hand and she sank back in her chair and quietly fainted away.