“But I cannot! oh, I cannot! I feel the burning of her terrible eyes upon me now.”
“But she is not even in the room.”
(Here Sybil slipped away to a short distance, and joined a group of masks as if she belonged to them.)
“But I shiver as if she were near me now.”
Lyon Berners suddenly looked around and then laughed, saying:
“But there is no one near you, dear Rosa, except Death.”
“Death!” she echoed with a start and a shudder.
“Why, how excessively nervous you are, dear Rosa,” said Lyon Berners laying his hand soothingly upon her shoulder.
“Oh, but just reflect what you have just said to me. ‘No one near me but Death!’ Death near me!” she repeated, trembling.
“Poor child, are you superstitious as well as nervous? It was the mask I meant. The mask that was Sybil’s partner in the quadrille which we danced with them,” laughed Lyon Berners.