The agonizing suspense in which Helen had been living for the last few days had laid a heavy hand upon her. Her cheeks were thin, and had been woefully pale until the sudden excitement of this visit had called up a faint hectic flush which had no kindred with the color of health. Her form, too, seemed to have shrunken, and the loose tea-gown which she wore enhanced the fragility of her appearance. She had been sitting in a low chair before the fire, with her head buried in her hands, but when her visitor was announced she was standing up with her dry, bright eyes eagerly fixed upon the woman who stood on the threshold. The door was closed, and they looked at one another for a moment in silence.
To an artist, the figures of these two women, each so intensely interested in the other, and each possessed of a distinctive and impressive personality, would have been full of striking suggestions. Helen, in her loose gown of a soft dusky orange hue, and with no harsher light thrown upon her features than the subdued glow of a shaded lamp, and occasional flashes of the firelight which gleamed in her too-brilliant eyes, seemed to have lost none of her beauty. All her surroundings, too, went to enhance it: the delicately-toned richness of the coloring around, the faintly perfumed air, the indefinable suggestion of feminine daintiness, so apparent in all the appointments of the little chamber. From the semi-darkness of her position near the door Helen's visitor brought her eager scrutiny to an end. She advanced a little into the room and spoke.
"You are Helen Thurwell?" she said softly. "Sir Allan Beaumerville has bidden me come to you. You have read his note?"
"Yes, yes, I have read it," she answered quickly. "He tells me that you have news—news that concerns Bernard Maddison. Is it anything that will prove his innocence?"
"It is already proved."
Helen gave a great cry and sank into a low chair. She had no doubts; her visitor's tone and manner forbade them. But the tension of her feelings, strung to such a pitch of nervousness, gave way all at once. Her whole frame was shaken with passionate sobs. The burning agony of her grief was dissolved in melting tears.
And the woman whose glad tidings had brought this change stood all the while patient and motionless. Once, when Helen had first yielded to her emotion, she had made a sudden movement forward, and a sweet, sympathetic light had flashed for a moment over her pale features. But something had seemed to restrain her, some chilling memory which had checked her first impulse, and made her resume her former attitude of quiet reserve. She stood there and waited. By and by Helen looked up and started to her feet.
"I had almost forgotten; I am so sorry," she said. "Do sit down, please, and tell me everything, and who you are. You have brought me the best news I ever had in my life," she added with a little burst of gratitude.
Her visitor remained standing—remained grave, silent, and unresponsive; yet there was nothing forbidding about her appearance. Looking into her soft gray eyes and face still beautiful, though wrinkled and colorless, Helen was conscious of a strange feeling of attraction toward her, a sort of unexplained affinity which women in trouble or distress often feel for one another, but which the sterner fiber of man's nature rarely admits of. She moved impulsively forward, and stretched out her hands in mute invitation, but there was no response. If anything, indeed, her visitor seemed to shrink a little away from her.
"You ask me who I am," she said softly. "I am Sir Allan Beaumerville's wife; I am Bernard Maddison's mother."