Such a slow, listless step, as if the very exertion of dragging the weary limbs along was too toilsome to be endured. And then the door opened, Julia Denham came in, and Florence could scarcely repress a cry of pitying astonishment.
The well-rounded figure had sharpened and wasted, the bright color had fled her cheek, and her mouth, despite its resolute set, was drawn down at the corners, and every feature lined with suffering. Her fine, dark eyes were fuller, brighter than of old, but the light in them was so hard and fierce that those who encountered her quick glances involuntarily shrank from them.
Susan gave a sigh, and murmured to Florence: “Go, dear—go!” But before she could move to obey, Julia’s eyes fell upon her. Drawing herself up more proudly than ever, she disdainfully rejected the hand Miss Heriton proffered, saying:
“Have you come to exult over me? Has Susan been regaling your ears with all the last items of scandal?”
“I have told Miss Heriton nothing,” her cousin quietly observed. “Do me more justice than to imagine that I should make your position a subject for gossip.”
“My position!” Julia angrily repeated. “What do you intend Miss Heriton to understand by that expression? Is she to join the throng of my accusers who dare to hint that I am no wife? That I invent the tale to cover my shame? As if,” she added, with increasing bitterness, “as if it were not the greatest disgrace of all to have given this hand”—dashing it violently against the table—“to a false and scheming profligate!”
Feeling the awkwardness of remaining, Florence repeated her farewells, and had nearly reached the door when Julia, with more gentleness, asked her to stay.
“Susan, perhaps, will not advise your compliance with my request, Miss Heriton; for, like the shocked matrons who no longer consider me worthy to teach their hopeful progeny, she distrusts every word I utter.
“You do—you do!” she added vehemently, when Susan gently denied this. “When you asked me where our marriage was celebrated, and I answered that I could not tell, that—trusting implicitly to his assurances that secrecy was necessary until he had established himself—I went where he chose to take me, and left the certificate of the rite in his care, you sighed and shook your head.”
“Not because I doubted your assertions, Julia; only from regret that your confidence had been so rashly given and so terribly misplaced.”