‘Will you stay a few minutes?’

She sat down and took Thyrza’s hand.  The latter continued: 

’I shall be glad if they would give me the sewing to do again, and the work at the Home.  Do you think they will, Mrs. Ormonde?’

‘Don’t you wish to go on with your lessons?’

’No.  I can’t stay there if I don’t earn enough to pay for everything.  I shall try to keep on with the singing.’

It was perhaps wiser to yield every point for the present.

‘It shall be as you wish, Thyrza,’ Mrs. Ormonde replied.

After a pause: 

’Mrs. Emerson will wonder where I am.  Will you write to her, so that I needn’t explain when I get back to-morrow?’

’I have just had an anxious letter from her, and I have already answered it.’

Thyrza withdrew her hand gently.

’I was wrong when I spoke in that way to you yesterday, Mrs. Ormonde,’ she said, meeting the other’s eyes.  ’You haven’t done me harm intentionally; I know that now.  But if you had let him come to me, I don’t think he would have been sorry—­afterwards—­when he knew I loved him.  I don’t think any one will love him more.  I was very different two years ago, and he thinks of me as I was then.  Perhaps, if he had seen me now, and spoken to me—­I know I am still without education, and I am not a lady, but I could have worked very hard, so that he shouldn’t be ashamed of me.’

Mrs. Ormonde turned her face away and sobbed.

‘I won’t speak of it again,’ Thyrza said.  ’You couldn’t help it.  And he didn’t really wish to come, so it was better.  I am very sorry for what I said to you, Mrs. Ormonde.’

But the other could not bear it.  She kissed Thyrza’s hands, her tears falling upon them, and went away.

CHAPTER XXXIX

HER RETURN

It was a rainy autumn, and to Thyrza the rain was welcome.  A dark, weeping sky helped her to forget that there was joy somewhere in the world, that there were some whom golden evenings of the declining year called forth to wander together and to look in each other’s faces with the sadness born of too much bliss.  When a beam of sunlight on the wall of her chamber greeted her as she awoke, she turned her face upon the pillow and wished that night were eternal.  If she looked out upon the flaming heights and hollows of a sunset between rain and rain, it seemed strange that such a scene had ever been to her the symbol of hope; it was cold now and very distant; what were the splendours of heaven to a heart that perished for lack of earth’s kindly dew?