Certainly he had
always dreaded the place, but never a word of that sort had he said
to her. Yet there was a shadow of possible comfort in the
thought--for, what if the whole thing should prove an hallucination!
But whether real or not, she must have his story.
"Come, dearest Poldie, darling brother!" she said, "you have not yet
told me what it is. What is the terrible thing you have done? I
daresay it's nothing so very bad after all!"
"There's the light coming!" he said, in a dull hollow voice, "--The
morning! always the morning coming again!"
"No, no, dear Poldie!" she returned. "There is no window here--at
least it only looks on the back stair, high above heads; and the
morning is a long way off."
"How far?" he asked, staring in her eyes--"twenty years? That was
just when I was bom! Oh that I could enter a second time into my
mother's womb, and never be born! Why are we sent into this cursed
world? I would God had never made it. What was the good? Couldn't he
have let well alone?"
He was silent. She must get him to sleep.
It was as if a second soul had been given her to supplement the
first, and enable her to meet what would otherwise have been the
exorbitant demands now made upon her.
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