Christine's face was averted and so colorless that it seemed like marble.
"Oh, Christine, don't you care?" said Susie, springing up and coming toward her.
"Why should I care?" was the quick answer.
Susie could not know that it was in reality but an incoherent cry of pain—the blind, desperate effort of pride to shield itself. But the tone checked her steps and filled her face with reproach.
"Perhaps you have more reason to care than you choose to admit," she said, pointedly.
Christine flushed, but said, coldly: "Of course I feel an interest in the fate of Mr. Fleet, as I do in that of every passing acquaintance. I feel very sorry for him and his friends"; but never was sympathy expressed in a voice more unnaturally frigid.
Susie looked at her keenly, and again saw the tell-tale flush rising to her cheek. She was puzzled, but saw that her friend had no confidence to give, and she said, with a voice growing somewhat cold also: "Well, really, Christine, I thought you capable of seeing as much as the rest of us in such matters, but I must be mistaken, if you only recognized in Dennis Fleet a passing acquaintance. Well, if he dies I doubt if either you or I look upon his equal again. Under right influences he might have been one of the first and most useful men of his day. But they need not tell me it was overwork that killed him. I know it was trouble of some kind."
Christine was very pale, but said nothing; and Susie, pained and mystified that the confidence of other days was refused, bade her friend a rather cold and abrupt adieu.
Left alone, Christine bowed her white face in her hands and sat so still that it seemed as if life had deserted her. In her morbid state she began to fancy herself the victim of some terrible fatality. Her heart had bounded when Susie Winthrop was announced, believing that from her she would gain sympathy; but in strange perversity she had hidden her trouble from her friend, and permitted her to go away in coldness. Christine could see as quickly and as far as any, and from the first had noted that Dennis was very interesting to her friend. Until of late she had not cared, but now for some reason the fact was not pleasing, and she felt a sudden reluctance to speak to Susie of him.
Now that she was alone a deeper sense of isolation came over her than she had ever felt before. Her one confidential friend had departed, chilled and hurt. She made friends but slowly, and, having once become estranged, from her very nature she found it almost impossible to make the first advances toward reconciliation.