Noiselessly Dinah drew near. There was something in the atmosphere--a ghostly, hovering presence--that awed her. In the sound of that racing wind she seemed to hear the beat of mighty wings.
She uttered no word, she was almost afraid to speak. But when she reached the bed, when she bent and looked into Isabel's face, she caught her breath in a gasping cry. For she was shocked--shocked unutterably--by what she saw. Shrivelled as the face of one who had come through fiery tortures, ashen-grey, with eyes in which the anguish of the burnt-out flame still lingered, eyes that were dead to hope, eyes that were open only to the darkness, such was the face upon which she looked.
Biddy was by her side in a moment, speaking in a rapid whisper. "Arrah thin, Miss Dinah darlint, don't ye be scared at all! She'll speak to ye in a minute, sure. It's only that she's tired to-night. She'll be more herself like in the morning."
Dinah hung over the still figure. Biddy's whispering was as the buzzing of a fly. She heard it with the outer sense alone.
"Isabel!" she said; and again with a passionate earnestness, "Isabel--darling--my darling--what has happened to you?"
At the sound of that pleading voice Isabel moved, seeming as it were to return slowly from afar.
"Why, Dinah dear!" she said.
Her dark eyes smiled up at her in welcome, but it was a smile that cut her to the heart with its aloofness, its total lack of gladness.
Dinah stooped to kiss her. "Are you so tired, dearest? Perhaps I had better go away."
But Isabel put up a trembling, skeleton hand and detained her. "No, dear, no! I am not so tired as that. I can't talk much; but I can listen. Sit down and tell me about yourself!"
Dinah sat down, but she could think of nothing but the piteous, lined face upon the pillow and the hopeless suffering of the eyes that looked forth from it.
She held Isabel's hand very tightly, though its terrible emaciation shocked her anew, and so for a time they were silent while Isabel seemed to drift back again into the limitless spaces out of which Dinah's coming had for a moment called her.
It was Biddy who broke the silence at last, laying a gnarled and quivering hand upon Dinah as she sat.
"Ye'd better come again in the morning, mavourneen," she said. "She's too far off to-night to heed ye."
Dinah started. Her eyes were full of tears as she bent and kissed the poor, wasted fingers she held, realizing with poignant certainty as she did it the truth of the old woman's statement. Isabel was too far off to heed.