The next day the patient was no better, she was evidently sinking. The news went swiftly round the city. It needed a servant constantly at the door to answer the stream of sympathetic inquirers. Reporters were watching the closed house from the opposite pavement. I undertook to satisfy some of them who gained the steps and came forward, civil enough and note-books in hand, when the door was opened. This intrusion of curiosity seemed so dreadful. The great house was silent. How vain and empty and pitiful it all seemed as I wandered alone through the gorgeous apartments! What a mockery it all was of the tragedy impending above-stairs--the approach on list-shod feet of the great enemy! Let us not be unjust. He would have come just the same if his prey had lain in a farmhouse among the hills, or in a tenement-house in C Street. A day and a night, and another day--and then! It was Miss Forsythe who came down to me, with strained eyes and awe in her face. It needed no words. She put her face upon my shoulder, and sobbed as if her heart were broken. I could not stay in the house. I went out into the streets, the streets brilliant in the sun of an autumn day, into the town, gay, bustling, crowded, pulsing with vigorous life. How blue the sky was! The sparrows twittered in Madison Square, the idlers sat in the sun, the children chased their hoops about the fountain. I wandered into the club. The news had preceded me there. More than one member in the reading-room grasped my hand, with just a word of sympathy. Two young fellows, whom I had last seen at the Henderson dinner, were seated at a small table. “It's rough, Jack”--the speaker paused, with a match in his hand--“it's rough. I'll be if she was not the finest woman I ever knew.” My wife and I were sitting in the orchestra stalls of the Metropolitan. The opera was Siegfried. At the close of the first act, as we turned to the house, we saw Carmen enter a box, radiant, in white. Henderson followed, and took a seat a little in shadow behind her. There were others in the box. There was a little movement and flutter as they came in and glasses were turned that way. “Married, and it is only two years,” I said. “It is only a year and eight months,” my wife replied. And the world goes on as cheerfully and prosperously as ever. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Little Journey in the World by Charles Dudley Warner