"You are in trouble," he spoke hoarsely, as if murmuring an excuse for having come.
She melted at once into the loveliest sorrow, her mobile features taking on a wan cast only enlivened by the glow of her cheeks.
"Sit down," she said, "you were so good to come to me, and so soon--" and her voice was like lily-bells in a quiet church-yard among the head-stones. She placed him a chair.
"Yes, I am in trouble. But that is a slight thing compared to my unhappiness. I think I am the most miserable creature that breathes upon this earth."
And with that she dropped into a low chair and hid her glowing face in a dainty, lace bordered kerchief that suppressed a well-timed sob.
Kate had wisely calculated how she could reach David's heart. If she had looked up then and seen his white, drawn look, and the tense grasp of his hands that only the greatest self-control kept quiet on his knee, perhaps even her mercilessness would have been softened. But she did not look, and she felt her part was well taken. She sobbed quietly, and waited, and his hoarse voice asked once more, as gently as a woman's through his pain: "Will you tell me what it is and how I can help you?" He longed to take her in his arms like a little child and comfort her, but he might not. She was another's. And perhaps that other had been cruel to her! His clenched fists showed how terrible was the thought. But still the bowed figure in its piteous black sobbed and did not reply anything except, "Oh, I am so unhappy! I cannot bear it any longer."
"Is--your--your--husband unkind to you?" The words tore themselves from his tense lips as though they were beyond his control.
"Oh, no,--not exactly unkind--that is--he was not very nice before he went away," wailed out a sad voice from behind the linen cambric and lace, "and he went away without a kind word, and left me hardly any money--and he hasn't sent me any word since--and fa-father won't have anything to do with me any more--but--but--it's not that I mind, David. I don't think about those things at all. I'm so unhappy about you. I feel you do not forgive me, and I cannot stand it any longer. I have made a fearful mistake, and you are angry with me--I think about it at night"--the voice was growing lower now, and the sentences broken by sobs that told better than words what distress the sufferer would convey.