Page:The Fate of Fenella (1892).djvu/163

 of her heart ached with the sudden rush of her emotion as she cried out, with outstretched arms: "My boy! bring me my boy!" To press the child in her arms, to feel the soft down of his cheek against hers, to hear the lisping, "Muzzer, muzzer, dear," from his lips, to have his arms about her—this, this would save her reason. She felt her reason going, felt her mind darkened, the path before her no longer clear. She was in a gloomy world, groping helplessly for a warm, human clasp of fellowship. Jacynth, her friend, answered her mother-cry. Answered, and left her childless.

Then he brought her here, here to this beautiful, lonely, wind-girt, sea-girt island, and left her to strain her eyes out into the sea, that said nothing to her. The sky was empty for her, the flowers, it seemed to her, faded as she looked. Poor beauty! poor coquettish, light-hearted Fenella!

Then she met Frank in the street, and light flashed back to her, and memory and understanding. In a rush of emotion she saw him as a lover, as husband, as Murderer. She knew what he had done. She knew, too, what she had done to save him. "Frank!" the words rushed to her lips, words of love, of forgiveness, of——and he repelled her. Ice-cold on her heart he lay, his dead love, his living contempt, and she who would have died for him, seemed as if she died by him.