“Well, I won’t use a stronger,” said Miss Arbuthnot, with an amused smile. “I dare say I should have felt the same myself. Yet, look at the matter philosophically. You only hate me for speaking, because your heart tells you I am right.”
“Oh, for more than that!” broke in the girl wildly.
“For more than that?” The older woman turned and glanced curiously at her. She went on slowly. “You think, perhaps, then, that I am the cause of your unhappiness?”
“Yes, I do. I think that you are treacherous, treacherous!” cried Claudia, stung beyond control. “You failed to keep his love yourself, yet could not endure to see it given to me. You set yourself to take it again—”
Her voice failed—choked. It was Miss Arbuthnot’s turn to grow a little pale, and she stood for a moment staring out at a bit of near common, across which soldiers were marching, light now and then flashing on their accoutrements.
“But—if I have proved to you that it is worthless?” she said slowly at last.
“Ah!” exclaimed Claudia scornfully, “do you think it worthless?”
Then Helen Arbuthnot did a strange thing. She turned and looked into Claudia’s eyes, her own unflinching, and she spoke as people speak in a great crisis of their life.
“Before Heaven, I do,” she said, “and that although I once cared for it more than for anything else in the world. Now have I set myself low enough?”
Something in her words, but more in the manner of their utterance, had indeed shaken and curiously affected Claudia. They might have been spoken by one who cared enough for her to venture much on her behalf. And yet they came from the lips of Miss Arbuthnot, the woman whom she had just accused of acting towards her in the most heartless manner in which woman can act towards woman, and who at this moment, she believed, was holding her love up to scorn. For a moment she was shaken, but she recovered herself.