So I left her to grieve for a faithless lover, And to hide her heart from the cold world’s sight As women do hide them, the wide earth over. My God! _was_ it Grace that I saw to-night?
I thought of her married, and often, with pity, A poor man’s wife in some dull place. And now to know she is here in the city, Under the gaslight, and with _that_ face!
Yet I knew it at once, in spite of the daubing Of paint and powder, and she knew me; She drew a quick breath that was almost sobbing, And shrank in the shade so I should not see.
There was hell in her eyes! She was worn and jaded; Her soul is at war with the life she has led. As I looked on that face so strangely faded, I wonder God did not strike me dead.
While I have been happy and gay and jolly, Received by the very best people in town, That girl whom I led in the way to folly Has gone on recklessly down and down.
Two o’clock, and no sleep has found me. That face I saw in the street-lamp’s light Peers everywhere out from the shadows around me-- I know how a murderer feels to-night!
When Dick, the little deformed invalid, hobbled from his bed into his chair-lounge at the window, where he reclined all day long, he saw a rosy-cheeked young woman polishing the windows across the street.
His pale face tinged with a sudden glow, and his painfully brilliant eyes shone with an increased lustre.
“Well, I _declare_ if my house isn’t occupied!” he cried, and he lifted the window and peered across the way with such an excited countenance, that the young woman opposite paused in her work to regard him. But after a moment’s observation the startled look in her face gave place to pity, for she saw that the great shining eyes were those of an invalid--an invalid child, she thought.
“Poor child; poor little fellow,” she said to herself, “and such a pretty face, too!”
But Dick was twenty-two years old, with a man’s heart and a man’s longings shut up in his deformed body. But since he was compelled to pass his days between a bed and a chair, with an occasional hour down on the curbing in the sunlight of a warm day, he found his whole enjoyment in his imagination. And wonderful flights it took, flights and freaks suspected by no one save good old Dr. Griffin, his one confidant.