“Oh, how can I tell you?” she faltered. “It is all so stupid—and I am so unhappy? He was goodness itself to me, and he must think that I behaved like a brute—a common girl of the streets—or meaner still, for at least it’s said they have some sense of gratitude. He came like Providence itself to help me, when I was absolutely starving and turned out of doors like a dog—and I was grateful, and yet here he must be thinking that I’m the very scum of the earth!”
She gazed at her companion out of swimming eyes, and for answer Adele kissed her.
“I will go now,” she stammered, hastily, as if the caress had further unnerved her. “I’ve stayed longer than I meant. Yes, I will come again—if you tell your father that I’ve been, and he says I may come.”
“I’d like to see him say anything else!” cried the young lady from Paris, Kentucky. “The idea!”
And when the door had closed upon Vestalia, this dark beauty clenched her hands, and strode indignantly about the room, and repeated between set teeth, “The very idea!”
CHAPTER XI
Vestalia paused at the street entrance of the hotel, and looked doubtfully up the hill toward the shifting outline of the strident, crowded Strand.
The prospect repelled her, and she bent her slow steps in the other direction. Crossing the empty, sun-baked roadway of the Embankment, she strolled westward in the partial shade of the young lime-trees, which maintain a temerarious existence along the line of the river’s parapet.