"I wish she'd stop talking to me; I don't want to hear about it. Why won't she bear her trouble alone, if she will make trouble about what isn't to be helped? I'll have no more confidences with her, that's certain. It is like breaking one's heart up in little pieces. I don't want to keep secrets, but forget them; and I will, too, in spite of her. She shan't make me eternally miserable with her pining and remorse."
Elsie paused before a mirror as these thoughts rose in her mind and half broke from her lips. She was threading out her curls and trying the effect as they floated, like golden thistledown, over the roses of her cheek. All at once she started, and a look of pale horror stole to her face; the hand which had been wandering among her hair dropped to her side, turning cold and white as marble; the lips which had been just parted with an admiring smile of her own beauty, lost every trace of color. She still gazed intently into the glass, but not at herself. Beyond her pretty image, reflected from the distance, sat a man with a pen in his hand, as if just arrested in the act of writing. Rich shadows of crimson drapery lay around him, and a gleam of pure light from a half-closed upper blind fell across his head, lighting it up grandly.
It was a magnificent picture that Elsie gazed upon, far beyond her own image in the glass. But she only saw the man, without regard to his surroundings, and the very heart in her bosom turned sick with loathing or with fear.
It was North, looking at her through the open door, with a sneering smile on his lip—North in the very chamber of her brother's wife, quietly seated there as if he had been master of the house. For a full minute Elsie stood, forming a double picture in the glass with that bold, bad man, then her color came hotly back, and she turned upon him, brave with indignation.
"You here!" she said, advancing into the room till its crimson haze overwhelmed her. "You here, and in this chamber! Get up at once and begone. If my brother finds you under his roof he will shoot you on the spot."
"Never fear, pretty one," said North, with an evil gleam on his face. "Two can play at a game of that sort. If he made the first assault nothing would give me more pleasure. Self-defence is justifiable in law, and his will is made."
Elsie was trembling from head to foot, but she leaned one hand heavily on the table that he might not see her agitation.
"Man, man, you would not—you dare not meet my brother. You that have wronged him so!"
"Excuse me," said North, biting the feather of his pen and looking down on a sheet of note-paper on which he had been about to write; "I do not see this wrong so clearly. If a woman's heart will wander off in any forbidden direction, am I to blame because it flutters into my bosom? And if other hearts follow after——"
"Stop!" cried Elsie, stamping her little foot passionately on the carpet. "How dare you speak of a fraud so black, of treason so detestable! I am his sister, sir, and have something of his courage, frivolous as people think me. Persecute her or provoke me too far and I will tell him all."