Ninas Letter

How they pitied her if it were so, and how curiously they watched
her whenever she appeared in their midst, remarking every action,
and construing it according to their convictions.

Victor, too, was on the alert, and fully aware of the public
feeling. Day after day he watched his young mistress, following
her when she left the house alone, and seeing her more than once
when in the Deering woods she laid her face in the springing grass
and prayed that she might die. But for her promise, sworn to
Richard, she would have gone to him, and kneeling at his feet
begged him to release her from her vow, and so spare her the
dreadful trial from which she shrank more and more as she saw it
fast approaching.

Edith was almost crazy, and Arthur, whenever he chanced to meet
her, marvelled at the change since he saw her last. Once he, too,
thought of appealing to Richard to save her from so sad a fate as
that of an unloving wife, but he would not interfere, lest by so
doing he should err again, and so in dreary despair, which each
day grew blacker and more hopeless, Edith was left alone, until
Victor roused in her behalf, and without allowing himself time to
reflect, sought his master's presence, bearing with him Nina's
letter, and the soiled sheet on which Richard had unwittingly
scratched out Arthur's marriage.

It was a warm, balmy afternoon, and through the open windows of
the library, the south wind came stealing in, laden with the
perfume of the pink-tinted apple blossoms, and speaking to the
blind man of the long ago, when it was his to see the budding
beauties now shut out from his sight. The hum of the honey-bee was
heard, and the air was rife with the sweet sounds of later spring.
On the branch of a tree without, a robin was trilling a song. It
had sung there all the morning, and now it had come back again,
singing a second time to Richard, who thought of the soft nest up
in the old maple, and likened that robin and its mate to himself
and Edith, his own singing-bird.