Servants came with restoratives.
IF GOD WOULD ONLY GIVE ME ANOTHER CHANCE!
"Poor creature! Poor creature!" said Mr. Ayrton. He had just returned from the room to which they had carried Ella. Phyllis was lying on the sofa with her face down to the pillow. "Poor creature! No one could have had any idea that she was so attached to him! She will be one of the richest women in England. He fell down in the club between nine and ten. His heart. Sir Joseph was not surprised. He said he had told him a short time ago that he had not six months to live. He cannot have let his wife know. Well, well, perhaps it was for the best. His man came to me in a terrible state. How was it to be broken to her? I just managed to catch the last train. He must have been worth over a million. She will be one of the richest women in England. Even in America a woman with three-quarters of a million is reckoned moderately well off. Poor creature! Ah! the shorn lamb!--the wind is tempered. 'In the midst of life--' Dear Phyllis! you must not allow yourself to break down. Your sympathetic nature is hard to control, I know, but still--oh, my child!"
But Phyllis refused to be comforted. She lay sobbing on the pillow, and when her father put his arm about her and raised her, she put her head on his shoulder, crying:
"He is gone from me forever--he is gone from me forever! Oh, I am the cruelest woman on earth! It is not for her terrible blow that I am crying, it is because I have lost him--I see it--I have lost him!"
Her father became frightened. What in the world could she mean by talking about the man being gone from her? He had never heard of a woman's sympathy extending to such limits as caused her to feel a personal deprivation when death had taken another woman's husband.
"Oh, I am selfish--cruel--heartless!" sobbed Phyllis. "I thought of myself, not of her. He is hers; he will be given back to her as she prayed--she prayed so to me before you appeared at the door, papa. 'Give him back to me! Give him back to me!' that was her prayer."
"My dearest child, you must not talk that way," said the father. "Come, Phyllis, your strength has been overtaxed. You must go to bed and try to sleep."