She could not say anything more lest she should break down entirely; and, glancing significantly at each other, the two ladies called Jennie, and bade her take her young mistress into the garden.
"Go to the rose-arbor. It is warmer there," Miss Lucy said; but only Jennie heard, for Bessie was too conscious of the blow which had fallen so suddenly upon her, to heed what was passing around her.
Grey was going to be married; her Gray, whom she now knew that she loved as she had never loved Neil McPherson even in the first days of her engagement, when he was all the world to her. Her Grey, who certainly had loved her once, or he would never have said to her what he did. Her Grey, who had been so kind to her on the ship and looked the love he did not speak. Why had he changed so soon? Was it some love of his boyhood before he saw her, and had it again sprung into being, now that he had returned to its object? And oh, how dreary the world looked to the young girl with the certainty that Grey was lost to her forever. She did not notice the fanciful summer-house into which Jennie wheeled her; did not notice anything, or think of anything except her desolation and a desire to be alone, that she might cry just as she had never cried before.
"Please, Jennie, go away," she said; "I would rather be alone."
So Jennie left her, and, covering her face with her hands, Bessie sobbed, piteously: "Oh, Father in heaven, is there never to be any joy for me? Must I always be so desolate and lonely, and is it wicked to wish that I were dead?"
For several minutes poor Bessie wept on, and then with a great effort she dried her tears, and, leaning her head back in her chair, began to live over again every incident of her life as connected with Grey Jerrold. And while she sat there thus, the Boston train stopped at the Allington station, and she heard the roar and the ring as it started on its way. Twenty minutes later she heard behind her the sound of a footstep, apparently hurrying toward her, and thought, if she thought at all, that it was Jennie coming for her. But surely Jennie's tread was never so rapid and eager as this, nor were Jennie's hands as soft and warm as the hands which encircled her face, nor Jennie's voice like this which said to her: "Bessie, darling Bessie!"
Grey had come to Allington from Springfield, where he had been on business for his father, and both Lucy and Miss McPherson knew that he was coming, and had chosen that day for Bessie's visit to the park, and had purposely talked before her of his probable marriage, in order to test the nature of Bessie's feelings for him.