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She was not crying, she was suffering, but dully, with a numb, torpid, miserable sense of pain. All her life since that rainy spring day, when Charley Stuart had come to Sandypoint with his mother's letter, returned to her.
What manner of young man was this who paid compliments while freezing with a broken leg? It was quite a new experience to her and amused her. It was an adventure, and excited all the romance dormant in her nature. "You're a stranger hereabouts?" she suggested. "Yes, a stranger, to my cost, and a very foolhardy one, or I should never have attempted to find Sandypoint in this confounded storm.
To-day it looked neither bright nor broad, but all blurred in gray wet mist; the surf cannonaded the shore with its dull thunder; the woodland in the background was a very black forest in the dreariness, and the roads who shall paint the state of the Sandypoint roads? Worst of all, the weather showed no sign of relenting, no symptoms of clearing up.
Stuart went back South to finish the winter and the honeymoon among the glades of Florida, and "do," as Charley said, "Love among the Roses." Mr. Darrell returned to Sandypoint. Mrs. Stuart, senior, took up her abode with Nellie Seton, pending such time as her children should get over the first delirium of matrimonial bliss and settle quietly down to housekeeping.
Perhaps if you searched the whole coast line between Maine and Florida, you could not light upon a drearier, dirtier, duller little town than the town of Sandypoint, Massachusetts. It was a straggling place, more village than town, consisting mainly of one long street, filled with frame houses of staring white, picked out with red doors and very green shutters.
She would think until thought became torture, until thought became actual physical pain. His words, spoken to her that last night she had ever spent at Sandypoint, came back to her full of bitter meaning now: "Whatever the future brings, don't blame me." The future had brought loneliness, and poverty, and despair all her own fault her own fault.
Her step-mother was master and mistress in her father's house, and to return, to go back to Sandypoint, and the life she had left, was as utter an impossibility almost as though she should take a rope and hang herself. She had not the means to go if she had desired, but that made no difference. She could never go back, never see her father, or Charley, or Trixy more.
He tells them very quietly, very resolutely her father who is there from Sandypoint, his mother, sister, Nellie, the doctor. They listen in wordless wonder; but what can they say? "The excitement will finish her mark my words," is the doctor's verdict; "I will never countenance any such melodramatic proceeding." But his countenance does not matter it seems.
Stuart was dead of the others they knew nothing. He went to Sandypoint in search of her father. Mr. Darrell and his family had months ago sold out and gone West. He could find none of them; he gave it up at length and returned to England. Ten months had passed; many resemblances had beguiled him, but to-day Edith was as far off, as lost as ever.
It was half past ten, and tired out thinking, tired out with her day's work, she had fallen into a sort of uneasy sleep and fitful dream in her chair when she suddenly became half conscious of some one near her. She had been dreaming of Sandypoint, of quarrelling with her cousin. "Don't Charley!" she said petulantly, aloud, and the sound of her own voice awoke her fully.
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