Both Gustav and her father came up to see her, creeping into the room to gaze and sigh, and turn away despairing.
She knew none of us; but just lay as though she had done with all the matters of earth: hovering on the edge of the thinnest line that can part death from life.
The two men stayed in the house: nursing I know not what angry thoughts each of the other; but both afraid to leave lest the moment of consciousness should come to her and find them absent.
I scarcely spoke to either of them, except to carry a brief message of her condition. If Gustav had brought this all about by his selfishness, it had been the Colonel who had made matters so desperately worse by his ill-timed harsh looks and words on the preceding day. And toward both I felt too hardly on her account to do other than leave them to the bitterness of their belated, unavailing remorse.
That both suffered acutely I could tell by their looks when I carried my brief news. But pity for them I could not feel. It was all absorbed by the gentle girl whom between them they had brought to the threshold of the grim portal.
All through the hours of that long autumn day, the coma continued, until the doctor confessed his fear that she would pass away without even a minute's lapse into consciousness.
"If she should be conscious may I bring them to her?" I asked him when he was going away at nightfall.
"There is risk either way; but if she asks for them, bring them--for a minute only, however."
"If she lives through the night--yes; but..." and he shook his head very gravely.
In the evening the last solemn pathetic offices of the Church were solemnized; and through it all she remained unconscious--mercifully, as it seemed to me, since it would have roused her to the knowledge that she was dying.
I went back to my chair by the bed with a heart full of foreboding. I recalled the General's words--so sadly prophetic--"Whom the gods love, die young." The saying had galled me as he quoted it; but it did so no longer.
She looked so frail and fragile in her sickness; a tender floweret so utterly unable to bear up against the rough cross winds of anger and strife which, held in restraint only by her weakness, would assuredly burst forth to blight her life, that one could only feel with sad resignation that the dark verdict was the best for her happiness.