Kate Clephane sank down into the depths of her chair as if she had been withered by a touch. She pressed her elbows against her side to try to hide the trembling of her body.
“How did you know it was a negress, mother?”
Kate sat helpless, battling with confused possibilities of fear; and in that moment Anne leapt on the truth.
“It was you, mother—you were the other woman? You went to see him the day you said you’d been to Meridia?” The girl stood before her now like a blanched Fury.
“I did go to Meridia!” Kate Clephane declared.
“You went to Baltimore too, then. You went to his house; you saw him. You were the woman who made the scene.” Anne’s voice had mounted to a cry; but suddenly she seemed to regain a sense of her surroundings. At the very moment when Kate Clephane felt the flash of the blade over her head it was arrested within a hair’s-breadth of her neck. Anne’s voice sank to a whisper.
“Mother—you did that? It was really you—it was your doing? You’ve always hated him, then? Hated him enough for that?”
Ah, that blessed word—hated! When the other had trembled in the very air! The mother, bowed there, her shrunken body drawn in on itself, felt a faint expanding of the heart.
“No, dear; no; not hate,” she stammered.
“But it was you?” She suddenly understood that, all the while, Anne had not really believed it. But the moment for pretense was past.