“Oh, I’m so sorry for you!” she whispered. “So very, very sorry. Much more than before I knew anything.”
Then Mrs. Dale gave way, and seeming for the first time to recover her powers of thought and of speech, she sank down on the nearest chair, and burst into tears, natural, healing tears, while she poured into Mabin’s ears a broken, incoherent confession:
“It is quite true that I did it—did what she told you. But you know, oh, Mabin, you do know how bitterly I have repented it! I would have given my life to have been able to live those few minutes over again! What did she tell you? Tell me, tell me! And how did she say it? Of course she made the very worst of it; but it was bad enough without that. Oh, Mabin, Mabin! Don’t you think she might forgive me now?”
While she talked in this wandering and excited way Mabin hardly knew what to do; whether to try to divert her thoughts, or to let her know in what a vixenish and hard manner the elder woman had made the announcement of the terrible action which had cut short one life and ruined another.
“Of course she ought to forgive you!” she said at last. “But you must not give way to despair if she does not. She is a hard woman; she will never treat you as tenderly as your own friends do.”
She paused, not liking to tell Mrs. Dale that the visitor was waiting for her, and wondering whether her friend had forgotten the fact. As she glanced toward the door, Mrs. Dale caught her eye, and suddenly threw herself upon her knees, burying her head in the girl’s lap.
“Oh, I daren’t, I daren’t go in—just yet!” she whispered almost pleadingly. “I know I sent for her; I know I must see her; but now that the moment has come, I feel as if I could not bear it. I know how she will look—what she will say. And it is upon her, all upon her, that my life, my very life depends!”
Mabin said nothing. She could not help thinking, from the wild words and wilder manner of the wretched woman before her, that the great strain of her crime and her repentance had ended by weakening her mind. Unless——
The girl drew a long breath, frightened by the awful possibility, which had just occurred to her, that the grim visitor in the drawing-room had been threatening Mrs. Dale with the extreme penalty of her crime. Mrs. Dale’s words—“My life depends upon her!” were explicit enough. Instinctively Mabin’s arm closed more tightly round the sobbing woman.
“Hush, hush, dear!” she whispered soothingly. “She will not dare, she will not dare to be more cruel than she has been already! You must try and be brave, and to bear her hard words; but she won’t do anything more than scold you!”