The scent of the yellow roses Flavia had put in her hair dilated to a stifling heaviness that hindered breath; she covered her eyes with her small cold fingers, seeking the dark, mute under torture. He was alive—that niggard concession was made to Allan Gerard, whose rich fullness of vigor and dominant presence last night had seemed the one firm reality in a world of pleasant vagueness. Weak, conscious of nothing but what her inward vision showed, she lay in her chair; questioning no more, making no sign.
Suddenly Isabel, the self-assured, evenly poised Isabel, was on the floor at her cousin's knees, burying her face in Flavia's pale-yellow dress and sobbing in frantic hysteria.
"Flavia, Flavia, I can't bear it! I am afraid, I am afraid—if he should die——"
Shocked back into strength, Flavia bent over her, soothing and caressing with soft touches and inarticulate phrases of affection.
"Hush, dear, hush! Put your head here. Let me call Martha; you frighten me, Isabel!"
The tempest did not last long. As abruptly as she had lost self-command, Isabel regained it. Rising to her feet, she swept back the disordered auburn curls from her flushed face and stood silent beside the desk, in a state approaching exhaustion. She was wearing a dark riding-habit soiled with dust and stained in several places with oil or grease, her high-laced boots were scratched and sand-covered. But Flavia was beyond notice of costume and saw only her cousin's sullen misery of expression.
"Dear, you loved him," escaped her, in her double compassion for the woman whom Gerard had not chosen.
Isabel's gray eyes were crossed by a spark.
"No—I hate him!" she flared viciously. "What did he do it for? He had no right. He, he——" She pressed her drenched handkerchief hard against her lips. "Corrie, poor Corrie——"