Helena heard the sound, and turned a startled glance in the direction from which it came.
Standing between the velvet curtains, she saw the motionless figure of Dolores, majestic in her beauty, her white garments and her golden hair clearly defined against the crimson background of the draperies.
Just for one breathless, pained second the two women who had been schoolmates and dear friends, looked into each other's eyes again. Then, as Helena made a movement toward her, Dolores turned her glance upon Percy—a strange, radiant, triumphant smile illuminating her face—and vanished as suddenly as she had appeared.
As she made her way through the city streets, many turned to look upon the white-robed figure, and the strangely-beautiful smiling face under the nodding plumes of her hat. But no man dared speak to her. There was something in her face that awed them, and protected her from insult.
She was still smiling when she entered her own apartment again. Carefully laying aside her wraps, she proceeded to set the room in perfect order. Then she brought out a little ebony box, in which she kept many curious souvenirs of her life abroad. In one corner lay a small chamois-skin bag. She opened it, and into a corner of a snowy cambric handkerchief, she shook a portion of its contents—a brilliant, crystallized substance—and then replaced the bag and locked the ebony box away in her cabinet again.
Laying the handkerchief on the pillow of her couch, she disrobed, brushed out her beautiful hair, and leaving the gas jet turned low, she crept into her snowy bed. Bringing the handkerchief close to her face, she looked smilingly down on the tiny crystals of the powder, as she murmured, "If only Madame Volkenburg was not mistaken—if only it is swift and sure, as she said! Oh Love, Love! even in death we shall not be parted. She will mourn over your cold clay; but your spirit will be with me, with me! You would have lived for her, but I die for you. Ah, God! how much sweeter death is, than life. Oh, my Love, my Love, you shall not take the journey alone! Whatever the great mystery is, we will solve it—together. May Christ receive our spirits."
She emptied the powder into her sweetly-parted lips, folded the handkerchief under her cheek, and lay quite still, as if she slept.
When Lorette came in the morning, she found her lying in the same position, the handkerchief under her cheek, and a sweet, glad smile upon her dead face.
The papers, on the following day, reported the sudden death, by heart disease, of beautiful Madame Percy, a young French lady.