"I guess you can get along without Richard Alger one Sunday evening,"
she had said finally, quite aloud, and quite harshly. "I guess your
own sister has just as much claim on you as he has. I dunno what's
going to be done. I don't believe Charlotte's father will let her in
the house to-night."
Poor Sylvia had sunk back in her chair. To her sensitive conscience
the duty nearest at hand seemed always to bark the loudest, and the
precious moments had gone by until she knew that Richard had come,
found the stone before the door, and gone away, and all her sweet
turmoil of hope and anticipation had gone for naught.
Sylvia, lying there awake that night, her mind carrying her back over
all that had gone before, had no doubt that this was the end of
everything. Not originally a subtle discerner of character, she had
come insensibly to know Richard so well that certain results from
certain combinations of circumstances in his life were as plain and
inevitable to her as the outcome of a simple sum in mathematics.
"He'd got 'most out of his track for once," she groaned out softly,
"but now he's pushed back in so hard he can't get out again if he
wants to. I dunno how he's going to get along."
Sylvia, with the roof settling over her head, with not so much upon
her few sterile acres to feed her as to feed the honey-bees and
birds, with her heart in greater agony because its string of joy had
been strained so high and sweetly before it snapped, did not lament
over herself at all; neither did she over the other woman who lay
up-stairs suffering in a similar case.
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