"No!" she cried. "I can’t stand it! Mommer, it’s too awful! You don’t know how awful! You don’t know what I did!"
"Why don’t you tell me, deary?"
"I can’t! I don’t know how. I’ll try." She sat up in bed and caught her mother’s hand. "The worst is the way I treated Eddie. He was so good to me! He asked me to marry him, and I said I would; and then, the very day he left, I went away—with his own brother!"
"Oh, Angie!" cried her mother, in horror.
"Oh, mommer, if you knew Eddie, you’d see what an awful thing I’ve done! He’s such a good man, and so—kind of noble, and all that! I don’t know how he’ll ever stand it. He trusted me."
"But what ever made you do such a thing, Angelica? Are you so terrible fond of this other one?"
"No—not now. No—that’s what I can’t explain. I don’t know why I did. I—I just seemed to forget everything. I—just thought—I loved him."
"And you don’t? You love the other one—the good one?"
Angelica began to weep.
"No," she said. "That’s the worst. I don’t love either of ’em. What’s the matter with me, do you suppose? I don’t seem to have any heart!" She struggled painfully to get her thought into words. "I hate Vincent, and I like Eddie, a lot; but love—I’ve never felt it at all, mommer, for any one," she sobbed. "Not that love they have in books. It makes me feel dreadful. If I loved Vincent, I wouldn’t feel so mean and low and bad. It would be—sort of splendid; but this! Mommer!"