y and gave me my
cue."

"I saw you. I saw the strange look that came over your face, but I
did not know what it meant. And perhaps the people envied you and
thought you must be so happy, to be so beautiful and admired. Oh, poor
Christine! I am sorry for you. I wish you could be happy. It seems as
if you might."

"_You_ might! Everything is possible to you. There is no reason, I
suppose, why you may not have all the happiness I ever dreamed of, for,
after all, the beginning and end of it was love. And yet I have advised
you never to marry--for I often disbelieve in the existence of the sort
of love that I have dreamed of--but how can I tell? I know nothing but
my own life, and I tell you that is an intolerable pain. I sit here and
say the words and you hear them, but they are words only to you, shut
off as you are from all the experiences that make up my suffering.
Lately there has been a new one. If anything could make my life more
miserable it would be the addition of poverty and privation to what I
bear already--and that is what I am threatened with--what may probably
be just ahead of me. Suppose that should come too! Why, then I should be
more unhappy yet, I suppose, although I have thought I couldn't be."

She spoke still with that strange calm which her companion had wondered
at from the beginning of their conversation. Her manner in the carriage
seemed to be a part of the excitement of the evening's performance, but
now the cold calm of reaction had come on and she was very quiet. She
had leaned back again in the big chair, and looked at Hannah gravely.
Neither of them thought of sleep, and their faces expressed its nearness
as little as if it were afternoon, instead of midnight. The last words
uttered by Christine had presented a practical difficulty to her friend
which her own experiences brought home to her forcibly, while they shut
her off from a just sympathy with some of her other trials.

"What do you mean?" she said. "Isn't your husband well off and able to
support you comfortably?"

"How do I know? How am I to find out?"

"Ask him. Make him explain to you exactly what his circumstances are. I
wonder you haven't done that long ago."

"You will wonder at a good deal more if you go on. For my part, I have
wondered and wondered until I have no power to wonder left. I did ask
him--that and many other things--and the result is I am as blind and
ignorant this moment as you are." She spoke almost coldly.