"What a charming room!" says Sir James, hypocritically; whereupon the good woman, being intensely flattered, makes her exit with as much grace as circumstances and her size will permit.
Clarissa opening the door with a beating heart, finds herself in a pretty, carefully-shaded room, at the farther end of which, on a sofa, Horace lies calmly sleeping. He is more altered than even her worst fears had imagined, and as she bends over him she marks, with quick grief, how thin and worn and haggard he has grown.
The blue veins stand out upon his nerveless hands. Tenderly, with the very softest touch, she closes her own fingers over his. Gently she brushes back the disordered hair from his flushed forehead, and then, with a quick accession of coloring, stoops to lay a kiss upon the cheek of the man who is to be her husband in one short month.
A hand laid upon her shoulder startles and deters her from her purpose. It is a light, gentle touch, but firm and decided and evidently meant to prevent her from giving the caress. Quickly raising herself, Clarissa draws back, and, turning her head, sees——
Who is it? Has time rolled backwards? A small, light, gray-clad figure stands before her, a figure only too well remembered! The brown hair brushed back from the white temples with the old Quakerish neatness, the dove-like eyes, the sensitive lips, cannot be mistaken. Clarissa raises her hands to her eyes to shut out the sight.
Oh! not that! Anything but that! Not Ruth Annersley!
A faint sick feeling overcomes her; involuntarily she lays a hand upon the back of a chair near her, to steady herself; while Ruth stands opposite to her, with fingers convulsively clinched, and dilated nostrils, and eyes dark with horror.
"What brings you here?" asks Ruth, at length, in a voice hard and unmusical.
"To see the man whose wife I was to have been next month," says Clarissa, feeling compelled to answer. "And"—in a terrible tone—"who are you?"
"The woman who ought to be his wife," says Ruth, in the same hard tone, still with her hands tightly clasped.