From the time that Mary had been carried from the carriage to her bed she felt that she had risked the last chance for her life, and lost it in order to gratify her revenge and gloat over the sight of her rival's misery; but even so she did not then regret it, for her triumph had been so full and complete, and every other thought was for the moment absorbed in the wish to see her sister; her affection for her being, as we have said before, the one pure feeling which not even the terrible passion of revenge could sully. But during the twenty-eight or thirty hours that she had lain on her dying bed she had been haunted by grim phantoms of terror regarding the unknown world to which she was going so fast, and she began to feel that the success of her revenge was far less sweet to think of than she had expected; now, however, Helena's coming brought up vividly before her the remembrance of that miserable night at Naples, and once more a flush of fierce satisfaction covered her face, as she muttered, "Well, at least I paid him off to the last farthing!" As these words passed her lips the door opened, and Helena entered, with the tears streaming from her eyes.
"Darling Lena!" exclaimed Mary, but without attempting to sit up, for the doctor had warned her that to do so would surely bring on a recurrence of the hemorrhage—"how good you were to come so quickly."
Helena threw herself on the bed beside Mary, and kissed her again and again, but she could not speak; and as Mary tried to soothe her, her tears only flowed the faster, until at last the former said in a broken voice, "Lena, think how you are trying me, and I have so little strength left to talk to you, or even to listen to you. I think I hear the nurse coming. Go and tell her not to come until you call her, and I begged mamma to lie down and rest for a little; so once more, Lena, you and I can have a tête-à-tête chat, as in days of old."
Helena silently rose, and did as Mary desired her; then returning, she seated herself beside the bed, and took her sister's cold hand in hers and began to rub it, saying, "How cold your hands are, sister!—let me warm them for you."
"They will never be warm again, Lena," answered Mary, with a sort of smile; "but never mind that now, tell me about yourself. Are you as happy as you expected to be?"
"Oh, Mary," rejoined Helena, trying to suppress her tears, "until I received that miserable telegram my happiness was unalloyed, and I only longed for the time when I could get you to come and stay with me, that you might have the pleasure of seeing what your kindness and affection had done for me; for had you not been all that you were to me, I should never have had the happiness of being Harry's. Mary, you must live to see your own work."
"Lena, how can you talk so! Has not mamma told you that by this time to-morrow I shall no longer be with you?"
"Yes," sobbed Helena; "but while there is life there is hope—and I will hope."
"You must not, Lena, for there is none; this is the second since——" a spasm caught her breath, but she went on, although her voice was evidently getting weak—"since that evening when you found me half fainting by the stone bench."
"Mary," cried Helena, almost angrily, "you have treated me shamefully in not letting me be told that you had an attack of this kind on the night of my wedding; and I saw by mamma that she blames me bitterly for having left you; she thinks that my doing so increased, even though it did not cause, your illness; and in justice to me, Mary, you ought to have written to me. I could have been with you all these weeks past since Harriet's marriage, and I might have saved you; being in your confidence, I could in some degree have prevented you from brooding over the past until it has killed you. Why have you kept me away from you, sister? But tell me what is all this about the ball, and Mr. Earnscliffe, and Flora Adair? I could not understand anything from mamma's account of it."