The maid discreetly withdrew, and Anna stood transfixed, gazing with puzzled frown at her sister.
“Annabel! Why, what on earth have you been doing to yourself, child?” she exclaimed.
Annabel laughed a little uneasily.
“The very question, my dear sister,” she said, “tells me that I have succeeded. Dear me, what a difference it has made! No one would ever think that we were sisters. Don’t you think that the shade of my hair is lovely?”
“There is nothing particular the matter with the shade,” Anna answered, “but it is not nearly so becoming as before you touched it. And what on earth do you want to darken your eyebrows and use so much make-up for at your age? You’re exactly twenty-three, and you’re got up as much as a woman of forty-five.”
Annabel shrugged her shoulders.
“I only use the weeniest little dab of rouge,” she declared, “and it is really necessary, because I want to get rid of the ‘pallor effect.’”
Anna made no remark. Her disapproval was obvious enough. Annabel saw it, and suddenly changed her tone.
“You are very stupid, Anna,” she said. “Can you not understand? It is of no use your taking my identity and all the burden of my iniquities upon your dear shoulders if I am to be recognized the moment I show my face in London. That is why I have dyed my hair, that is why I have abandoned my rôle of ingenuèe and altered my whole style of dress. Upon my word, Anna,” she declared, with a strange little laugh, “you are a thousand times more like me as I was two months ago than I am myself.”
A sudden sense of the gravity of this thing came home to Anna. Her sister’s words were true. They had changed identities absolutely. It was not for a week or a month. It was for ever. A cold shiver came over her. That last year in Paris, when Annabel and she had lived in different worlds, had often been a nightmare to her. Annabel had taken her life into her hands with gay insouciance, had made her own friends, gone her own way. Anna never knew whither it had led her—sometimes she had fears. It was her past now, not Annabel’s.