Presently she came and stood beside the couch, and laid her cool hand on Juliet's burning forehead.
"Juliet dear," she said gently, "I am very sorry for you. Madame told me you were ill, and indeed you look ill, my poor little sister. I don't want to be hard on you. You have done very wrong, but—I think you have your punishment."
A deep sob from Juliet attested the truth of this assertion.
Salome sat down beside her, and it was some time ere she spoke again. When Juliet's sobs grew less frequent, she suggested gently, "Don't you think, Juliet, you would feel better if you told me all about it? I cannot understand how you came to take such a step."
Juliet did not at once respond to this invitation. It was hard; it was inexpressibly bitter to her pride to tell the story of her folly. But gradually Salome, who had become strangely gentle and patient, led her on to confess all—her belief in her own powers, her longing to win a dazzling success as a public singer, the subtle way in which the temptation to take her own way in defiance of her mother's wish had been presented to her, the manner in which she had suffered herself to be led on from one deceit to another, always trying to persuade herself that the end would justify the means, and that her mother would eventually not only forgive her, but be glad that she had acted as she had done.
Salome was deeply moved as she listened. She was filled with burning indignation against the crafty, unprincipled man who had taken advantage of Juliet's foolish vanity and utter ignorance of the world to serve his own ends, and had betrayed her into a course of action which might have ended for her far more disastrously than it had. Moreover, she was startled and moved to self-reproach by this revelation of the utterly hidden life Juliet had been living side by side with her own.
"Oh, Juliet!" she said. "If only I had known! If only you could have confided in me! But it was my fault; I was too hard on you. I was so shut up in myself, that I did not try to understand you. Oh, you cannot think how it hurts me now, to think that if I had been different, this might never have happened."
And to Juliet's amazement, Salome began to sob.
"Oh, don't, Salome!" said Juliet faintly; and then she began to sob too, but uttering broken words between her sobs.
"It wasn't your fault; it was just my own. I knew I was doing wrong, and I didn't care—I meant to take my own way—and I thought other things would come right somehow. But now I have made everybody wretched—and mother! Oh, I can never forgive myself. If mother should die, I can never be happy again!"