"Your mother and I talked it over before you got home and thought it best to leave you entirely free to choose. But when we saw you overcome by joy—"
"Don't!" she interrupted, her voice a cry of pain. "I can't bear it! Don't!" Years of false self-sacrifice, of deceiving her parents and her child, of self-suppression and self-degradation, and this final cruelty to Gladys—all, all in vain, all a heaping of folly upon folly, of wrong upon wrong.
She rushed toward the house. She must fly somewhere—anywhere—to escape the thoughts that were picking with sharp beaks at her aching heart. Half-way up the walk she turned and fled to a refuge she would not have thought of half an hour before to her father's arms.
"Oh, father," she cried. "If I had only known you!"
Gladys, returning from her walk, went directly to Pauline's sitting-room.
"I'm off for New York and Europe to-morrow morning," she began abruptly, her voice hard, her expression bitter and reckless.
"Where can she have heard about Leonora?" thought Pauline. She said in a strained voice: "I had hoped you would stay here to look after the house."
"To look after the house? What do you mean?" asked Gladys. But she was too full of herself to be interested in the answer, and went on: "I want you to forget what I said to you. I've got over all that. I've come to my senses."
Pauline began a nervous turning of her rings.
Gladys gave a short, grim laugh. "I detest him," she went on. "We're very changeable, we women, aren't we? I went out of this house two hours ago loving him—to distraction. I came back hating him. And all that has happened in between is that I met him and he kissed me a few times and stabbed my pride a few times."