"Enough!"
"You wrong me vilely! You must let me—"
"I have an excellent memory, and it serves me well."
Hetty suddenly threw herself upon the couch and buried her face in her arms. Great sobs shook her slender frame.
Sara stood over her and watched for a long time with pitiless eyes. Then a queer, uneasy, wondering light began to develop in those dark, ominous eyes. She leaned forward the better to listen to the choked, inarticulate words that were pouring from the girl's lips. At last, moved by some power she could not have accounted for, she knelt beside the quivering body, and laid her hand, almost timorously, upon the girl's shoulder.
"Hetty,—Hetty, if I have wronged you in—in thinking that of you,—I—I—" she began brokenly. Then she lifted her eyes, and the harsh light tried to steal back into them. "No, no! What am I saying? What a fool I am to give way—"
"You have wronged me—terribly, terribly!" came in smothered tones from the cushions. "I did not dream you thought that of me."
"What was I to think?"
Hetty lifted her head and cried out: "You would not let me speak! You refused to hear my story. You have been thinking this of me all along, holding it against me, damning me with it, and I have been closer to you than—My God, what manner of woman are you?"
Sara seized her hands and held them in a fierce, tense grip. Her eyes were glowing with a strange fire.