verse had given way, was broken to pieces, crumbled to dust, annihilated.
Some one took her tenderly in his arms, smoothed her hair, kissed those moist, red, tear-swollen eyes of hers.
She felt it, and this act, meant to comfort her, seemed to her harder than all to bear. It was a kiss of pure sympathy for suffering, of mere humanity, a last farewell kiss.
The anguish she felt stifled her; she could not breathe,—till her pain tore its way out of her breast in a tempest of weeping.
Then, as in a nightmare, she heard his steps farther, farther away, and the sound of the door closing upon him. She knew it was closing upon him for ever; she knew that he would not return.
And then there came a time when she crept to his feet, like some poor beast that its master has driven away; and when, no longer admitted to his house, she loitered about for him in coffee-houses and in the street, and importuned him with letters incessantly. Whichever way he went, he was doomed to behold that face, pale as a spectre, and those eyes, so reproachful and so full of entreaty!
At present Owinski salutes her distantly, as
