Whenever her emotions were about to overcome her, she slipped away, not to her own room, where she was liable to interruption, but far up into the empty attics of the old house, where, in some corresponding chamber of desolation, she gave way to such storms of anguish and despair as leave the deepest
“Traces on heart and brain.”
And after an hour or two she would return to the drawing-room, whence she had never been missed by the pair of sentimentalists, who had been too much absorbed in each other, and in Mozart or Beethoven, to notice her absence.
And while all unconscious of her, they continued their musical flirtation, she would sit with her back to the light, toying with her crochet-work and listening to Rosa’s songs.
She was still as a volcano before it bursts forth to bury cities under its burning lava flood!
Why did she not, in the sacred privacy of their mutual apartment appeal to the better nature of her husband by telling him how much his flirtation with their guest pained her, his wife? Or else, why had she not spoken plainly with her guest?
Why? Because Sybil Berners had too much pride and too little faith to do the one or the other. She could not stoop to plead with her husband for the love that she thought he had withdrawn from her; still less could she bend to tell her guest how much his defection troubled her. Nor did she believe her interference would do any good. For, to Sybil Berners earnest nature, all things seemed earnest, and this vain and shallow flirtation wore the aspect of a deep, impassioned attachment. And in her forbearance she acted from instinct rather than from reason, for she never even thought of interfering between these platonists. So, outwardly at least, she was calm. But this calmness could not last. Her heart was bleeding, burning, breaking! and its prisoned flood of fire and blood must burst forth at length. The volcano seems quiet; but the pent up lava in its bosom must at last give forth mutterings of its impending irruption, and swiftly upon these mutterings must follow flames and ruin!
It happened thus with Sybil.
One morning, when the weather was too threatening to permit any one to indulge in an outdoor walk, it chanced that Lyon and Sybil Berners were sitting together at a centre-table in the parlor—Lyon reading the morning paper; Sybil trying to read a new magazine—when Rosa Blondelle, with her flowing, azure-hued robes and her floating golden locks, and her beaming smiles, entered the room and seated herself at the table, saying sweetly:
“My dear Mrs. Berners, is it to-morrow that you and I have arranged to drive out and return the calls that were made upon us?”