I am so miserable. Heavens, how you look at
me. We were friends once..."
Overwhelmed, I turned right about, and went in to the dancers again.
A little after, Edwarda herself came in and took up her place by the
piano, at which the travelling man was seated, playing a dance; her face
at that moment was full of inward pain.
"I have never learned to play," she said, looking at me with dark eyes.
"If I only could!"
I could make no answer to this. But my heart flew out towards her once
more, and I asked:
"Why are you so unhappy all at once, Edwarda? If you knew how it hurts
me to see--"
"I don't know what it is," she said. "Everything, perhaps. I wish all
these people would go away at once, all of them. No, not you--remember,
you must stay till the last."
And again her words revived me, and my eyes saw the light in the
sun-filled room. The Dean's daughter came over, and began talking to me;
I wished her ever so far away, and gave her short answers. And I
purposely kept from looking at her, for she had said that about my eyes
being like an animal's. She turned to Edwarda and told her that once,
somewhere abroad--in Riga I think it was--a man had followed her along
the street.
"Kept walking after me, street after street, and smiling across at me,"
she said.
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