"Oh, Richard!" she sighed, as she went back to the bridal chamber. "You
would pity me now, and forgive me, too, if you knew what I am suffering
here in your home, which can never, never be mine!"
She was standing now near the low window, taking in the effect of her
surroundings, from the white ground carpet covered with brilliant
bouquets, to the unrumpled, snowy bed which looked so deliciously cool
and inviting and seemed beckoning the poor, tired woman to its embrace.
And Ethie yielded at last to the silent invitation, forgetting
everything save how tired, and sorry, and fever-smitten she was, and how
heavy her swollen eyelids were with tears unshed, and the many nights
she had not slept. Ethie's cheeks were turning crimson, and her pulse
throbbing rapidly as, loosing her long, beautiful hair, which of all her
girlish beauty remained unimpaired, and putting off her little gaiters,
she lay down upon the snowy bed, and pressing her aching head upon the
pillows, whispered softly to her other self--the Ethelyn Grant she used
to know in Chicopee, when a little twelve-year-old girl she fled from
the maddened cow and met the tall young man from the West.
"Governor Markham they call him now," she said, "and I am Mrs.
Governor," and a wild laugh broke the stillness of the rooms kept so
sacred until now.
In the hall below Hannah overheard the laugh, and mounting the stairs
cast one frightened glance into the chamber where a tossing, moaning
figure lay upon the bed, with masses of brown hair falling about the
face and floating over the pillows.
Good Mrs. Dobson dropped one of the jars she was filling when Hannah
came with her strange tale, and leaving the scalding mass of pulp and
juice upon the floor, she hastened up the stairs, and with as stern a
voice as it was possible for her to assume, demanded of Ethelyn what she
was doing there. But Ethie only whispered on to herself of divorces, and
governors' wives-elect, and bridal chambers where she could rest so
nicely. Mrs. Dobson and Mrs. Dobson's ire were nothing to her, and the
good woman's wrath changed to pity as she met the bright, restless eyes,
and felt the burning hands which she held for a moment in her own. It
was a pretty little hand--soft and white and small almost as a child's.
There was a ring upon the left hand, too; a marriage ring, Mrs. Dobson
guessed, wondering now more than ever who the stranger was that had thus
boldly taker possession of a room where none but the family ever came.
"She is married, it would seem," she said to Hannah, and then, as
Richard's name dropped from Ethelyn's lips, she looked curiously at the
flushed face so ghastly white, save where spots of crimson colored the
cheeks, and at the mass of hair which Ethie had pushed up and off from
the forehead it seemed to oppress with its weight.