Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/178

 on the way, and a new grave—and a squalid camp of gypsies—and a broken bridge—''and I am afraid! What shall I do?"''

She laughed aloud at the absurdity, and cut at the White Pony sharply with her whip. It would be lighter, she thought, on the open village road below the hill.

Love? Amusement? Sympathy? She shook her young fist defiantly at the hulking contour of a stolid, bored old mountain that loomed up through a gap in the trees. "Drat Self-sufficiency," she cursed, with a vehement little-girl curse. "I won't be a bored old Mountain. I won't! I won't! I won't!"

All her short, eager life, it seemed, she had been floundering like a stranger in a strange land—no father or mother, no chum, no friend, no lover, no anything—and now just for a flash, just for one "little, perfect hour" she had found a voice at last that spoke her own language, and the voice belonged to a Man who belonged to another woman!

She remembered her morning's singing with a bitter pang. "Nothing is mine forever. Nothing, nothing, NOTHING!" she sobbed.

A great, black, smothering isolation like a pall settled down over her, and seemed to pin itself with a stab through her heart. Everybody, once in his time, has tried to imagine his Dearest-one