In the darkness of her room, a young figure lay stricken with grief
across her bed, mourning the vision of her ideals that seemed gone
without fulfillment. In the morning when she heard the happy sound
of laughing voices the hopelessness of her bereavement came over her
afresh. She was alone in her sorrow and memories. She was so weak that
her body felt bruised, and her arms lay like a dead weight at her
side. Was her courage broken? She prayed a passionate prayer for the
poor, heartless women who had kept faith with virtue, and had not been
rewarded--who had scattered their broken ideals along the road that they
went, that all who followed must bleed and suffer. She reached out for
her violin; for a while she lay still with it in her arms. It was not
sufficient. She needed some human thing for companionship. Her soul
hated its bodily enthrallment--she would fly out of it--she must. With a
supreme effort she raised herself, and faced the mirror. Her wide, dim
eyes looked out at her in pity. Then from her window she saw a steamer
going out. It was time for the Majestic that was to take Glenn Andrews
out of New York--out of her life. The two loves of her life--they must
die together. Suddenly grasping the neck of her violin, she struck it
against the side of the bed and shattered the exquisite thing. She fell
back prostrate, and there for weeks she lay between this life and the
eternal.
CHAPTER V.
GLENN ANDREWS went to France, to Moret-sur-Loing, an old cathedral
town, thinly peopled, on the skirts of the forest of Fontainbleu.
It was secluded and out of the way. Here he would lead a quiet life
of study and work. This was his delight. A poet-soul living in the
pursuit, not possession of the ideal. He had taken up his abode in
a little, old inn. Away from the world and yet so near it. This was
a beautiful country; the sight of it did his spirit good. He loved
the hills and valleys and streams. On one side the ruins of an old
Keep belting him, and on the other, the mills with long rows of deep
windows, from which the workers looked out upon the sunshine and their
homes. The small mill-houses nestled low in the leaves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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