Page:Ethel Churchill 3.pdf/105

Rh table, together with a small basket; and, looking around, saw Walter asleep on the sofa. She bent over him for a few minutes with an expression of anxiety and tenderness, which, for the time, quite subdued the expression of her bold, though fine features. Sleep showed the change that a few months had wrought. The soft brown hair was damp, and the dew stood on the white forehead, where the blue veins were azure as a woman's. You saw the pulses beat in the clear temples, and the chest heaved with the quick throbbing of the heart. The cheek was flushed with rich unnatural crimson; but both around the mouth and eyes hung a faint dark shadow, the surest herald of disease. The hand, too, how white and emaciated it was! yet with a feverish pink inside. The girl leaned over him—vain, coquetish, selfish; the degradation inevitable, from her position lowering even more a nature not originally of fine material; yet one spot in her heart was generous, and even pure. She loved him. Had she been beloved again, her whole