and, stupidly striving to comprehend what it meant,
and idly muttering to her miserable self, she poured out a third glass,
held it in her hand as well as she was able, and came tottering forward,
swaying to and fro in maudlin efforts to keep her feet. She took up her
position directly behind Harry, and looked vacantly out. She was trying
to ask what was the matter, with a tongue whose palsied utterance made
language incomprehensible, when Harry's friend, whom he had been
watching, and whose figure he had, with love's delicate discrimination,
picked out from a score of similar figures, and known to be hers, when
it was but a mere speck in the distance, passed directly under the open
window, and, startled by that sob and by that drunken voice in answer,
looked wonderingly up. Oh, heavens! she read that fearful secret in one
blank, horrified glance. She read it in the despairing hopelessness of
the little face turned toward hers--that look so terrible in a face so
young. She read it still more clearly in that fiery, bloated, senseless
visage looking down upon her with a dull stare, in the swaying form
feebly holding the tell-tale glass. She knew now why that delicate
child, nursed in the lap of affluence, having all that wealth could
purchase, had come so timidly to her lowly dwelling, and earnestly
besought her for a single kiss; what had made the little face sorrowful
and wan, and set that seal of suffering upon it. She saw it all, and,
under the sudden weight of that astounding revelation, she literally
staggered as under the weight of a blow. Looking down through his
tear-dimmed eyes at the face he loved so well, Harry saw upon it no look
of sympathy or recognition for him--only that blank, amazed,
horror-stricken look at that something behind him, a look which embraced
every item of the shameful scene, and showed all too clearly how plainly
it did so. Then, without a word or glance of kindness, she gathered her
veil closely about her pallid visage, and quickly hurried away. Alas for
Harry! he feels that the truth has turned her heart from his, and she
has gone forever. The anguish of that thought was too great for
suppression, and he stretched forth his hands toward the retreating
figure with a forlorn wail of supplication. That look of horror, that
low, plaintive, heart-broken cry, like a child forsaken of its mother,
had sobered her a little. She had been a proud woman once, and a remnant
of the nobler pride which ha