Henrietta sat in pale and
speechless horror.
"But how long is it since my poor Edith has been so awfully widowed?" at
length inquired Mrs. Waugh.
"Nearly four months," replied Marian, in a tremulous voice. "For six
weeks succeeding his death, she was not able to rise from her bed. I
came from school to nurse her. I found her completely prostrated under
the blow. I wonder she had not died. What power of living on some
delicate frames seem to have. As soon as she was able to sit up, I began
to think that it would be better to remove her from the strange country,
the theatre of her dreadful sufferings, and to bring her to her own
native land, among her own friends and relatives, where she might resume
the life and habits of her girlhood, and where, with nothing to remind
her of her loss, she might gradually come to look upon the few wretched
months of her marriage, passed in England, as a dark dream. Therefore I
have brought her back."
"And you, my dear child," she said, "you were Michael Shields' sister?"
"No, madam, no kin to him--and yet more than kin--for he loved me, and I
loved him more than any one else in the world, as I now love his poor
young widow. This was the way of it, Mrs. Waugh: Michael's father and my
mother had both been married before, and we were children of the first
marriages; when Michael was fourteen years old, and I was seven, our
parents were united, and we grew up together.
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