“You’ve a letter for me, haven’t you?” she panted.

Miss Macy, turning from the toilet-table, inclosed her in attenuated arms.  “Oh, darling, did you expect one to-day?”

“Do give it to me!” Lizzie pleaded with burning eyes.

“But I haven’t any!  There hasn’t been a sign of a letter for you.”

“I know there is.  There must be,” Lizzie persisted, stamping her foot.

“But, dearest, I’ve watched for you, and there’sbeen nothing, absolutely nothing.”

Day after day, for the ensuing weeks, the same scene reenacted itself with endless variations.  Lizzie, after the first sharp spasm of disappointment, made no effort to conceal her anxiety from Miss Macy, and the fond Andora was charged to keep a vigilant eyeupon the postman’s coming, and to spy on the bonne for possible negligence or perfidy.  But these elaborate precautions remained fruitless, and no letter from Deering came.

During the first fortnight of silence Lizzie exhausted all the ingenuities of explanation.  She marveled afterward at the reasons she had found for Deering’s silence:  there were moments when she almost argued herself into thinking it more natural than his continuing to write.  There was only one reason which her intelligence consistently rejected, and that was the possibility that he had forgotten her, that the wholeepisode had faded from his mind like a breath from a mirror.  From that she resolutely turned her thoughts, aware that if she suffered herself to contemplate it, the motive power of life would fail, and she would no longer understand why she rose up in the morning and laydown at night.

If she had had leisure to indulge her anguish she might havebeen unable to keep such speculations at bay.  But she had to be up and working:  the blanchisseuse had to be paid, and Mme. Clopin’s weekly bill, and all the little “extras” that even her frugal habits had to reckon with.  And in the depths of her thought dwelt the dogging fear of illness and incapacity, goading her to work while she could.  She hardly remembered the time when she had been without that fear; it was second nature now, and it kept her on her feet when other incentives might have failed.  In the blankness of her misery shefelt no dread of death; but the horror of being ill and “dependent” was in her blood.

In the first weeks of silence she wrote again and again to Deering, entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life.  From the first she had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet in her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been too possessive, too exacting in her tone.  She told herself that his fastidiousness shrank from any but a “light touch,” and that hers had not been light enough.  She should havekept to the character of the “little friend,” the artless consciousness in which tormented genius may find an escape from its complexities; and instead, she had dramatized their relation, exaggerated her own part in it, presumed, forsooth, to share the front of the stage with him, instead of being content to serve asscenery or chorus.