With her eyes on the needle which she held carefully poised for the next stitch, Virginia hesitated while the muscles of her face quivered for an instant and then grew rigid again.
"What good would it do," she asked, "to hold him to me when he wishes to be free?" And then, with one of those flashes of insight which came to her in moments of great emotional stress, she added quietly, "It is not the law, it is life."
Putting her arms around her, Susan pressed her to her bosom as she might have pressed a suffering child whom she was powerless to help or even to make understand.
"Jinny, Jinny, let me love you," she begged.
"How did you know?" asked Virginia, as coldly as though she had not heard her. "Has it got into the papers?"
For an instant Susan's pity struggled against her loyalty. "General Goode told me that there had been a good deal about Oliver and—and Miss Oldcastle in the New York papers for several days," she answered, "and this morning a few lines were copied in the Dinwiddie Bee. Oliver is so famous it was impossible to keep things hushed up, I suppose. But you knew all this, Jinny darling."
"Oh, yes, I knew that," answered Virginia; then, rising suddenly from her chair, she said almost irritably: "Susan, I want to be alone. I can't think until I am alone." By her look Susan knew that until that minute some blind hope had kept alive in her, some childish pretence that it might all be a dream, some passionate evasion of the ultimate outcome.
"But you'll let me come back? You'll let me spend the night with you, Jinny?"
"If you want to, you may come. But I don't need you. I don't need anybody. I don't need anybody," she repeated bitterly; and this bitterness appeared to change not only her expression, but her features and her carriage and that essential attribute of her being which had been the real Virginia.
Awed in spite of herself, Susan put on her hat again, and bent over to kiss her. "I'll be back before bed-time, Jinny. Don't shut me away, dear. Let me share your pain with you."