Suddenly she sprang up and began to array herself in a walking suit. She would go and see her father, learn what had induced his cruel course, and perhaps some mistake might be discovered and corrected. She knew that this step would subject her to her mother's displeasure, but just then the girl's heart was hardened against her, in consequence of her persistency in dramatizing a record which the daughter deemed too mournfully solemn and sacred for the desecration of the boards and footlights.
Grieved and mortified by this resolution, over which her passionate invective and persuasion exerted not the slightest influence, she availed herself of the absence of her mother and Mrs. Waul to leave the hotel and get into a carriage.
The Directory supplied her with the address she sought, and ere many moments she found herself in front of the stately, palatial pile, in which Cuthbert Laurance had long dwelt Desiring to see Mr. Laurance on business, she was shown into the elegant salon, and when the servant returned to say that he had left the house but a few minutes before she entered, she still lingered.
"Can I see Mrs. Laurance?"
"Madame is at Nice. Only Mademoiselle Maud is at home."
At that instant a side door opened, and a stout, middle-aged woman pushed before her into the room a low chair placed on wheels, in which sat Maud. At sight of the stranger, Victorine turned to retreat with her charge, but Regina made a quick gesture to detain her, and went to the spot where the chair rested.
Maud sat with her lap full of violets and mignonette, which she was trying to weave into a bouquet, but arrested in her occupation, her weird black eyes looked wonderingly on the visitor. How vividly they contrasted, the slender, symmetrical figure of Regina, her perfect face and graceful bearing, with the swarthy, sallow, dwarfed, and helpless Maud! As the former looked at the melancholy features, prematurely aged by suffering, a well of pity gushed in her heart, and she bent down and took one of the thin hands from which the flowers were slipping unnoticed.
"Is this little Maud?"
"My name is Maud Ames Laurance. What is your name? Why, you are just like papa! Do you know my papa?"
"No, dear; but I shall some day. I should very much like to know you."