“Why, that isn’t so easy,” Annie replied dubiously, much mistrusting the sanity of all this conversation, but pushed along with it in spite of herself. “He said something about a misunderstanding with his poor brother, and then—then something that I didn’t at all understand about a temptation, a great temptation leading him to the gates of hell he called it—but you know how Seth is given to exaggerate everything—and then——”
“He told you all this, did he. How confiding! How sweet! Go on—what else did he say to you—in the moonlight.”
Annie felt vaguely that the tone was cruel and hostile. As she paused in bewildered self-inquiry, Isabel glided forward and confronted her, with gleaming eyes and a white, drawn face.
“Why do you stop there?” she demanded in a swift, bitter whisper.
“There are things which—a girl doesn’t like to—have dragged from her in this——”
Even as Annie was forming this halting halfsentence, a change came over the elder woman. She dropped the hand which had been raised as if to clutch Annie’s shoulder. The flashing light passed from her eyes, and something of color, or at least of calm, came back into her face.
“I understand!” she said, simply.
“You can see, Isabel, that this is not a time I should have chosen to speak of such things to you, if you had not insisted. It seems almost barbarous to bring my joy forward, at such a time, and appear to contrast it with your affliction. You won’t think I wanted to do it, will you?”
The widow of a day was looking contemplatively at her companion; she had effaced from both expression and voice every trace of her recent agitation. “Are you sure it is all joy?” she asked calmly.
“I wouldn’t admit it to him. And at first I was not altogether clear about it in my own mind. Indeed, with this other and terrible thing, I can scarcely think soberly about it, as it ought to be thought of. But still—you know, Isabel, we were little children together—and I have never so much as thought of anybody else.” Annie spoke more confidently, as she went on; the notion that there had been malevolence in Isabel’s tone had faded into a foolish fancy: there seemed almost encouragement, sympathy, in her present expression. “I should have lived and died an old maid if he had not come to me. And it comforts me, dear, too, to think that in your great trouble I shall have almost a sister’s right to be with you, and help you bear it.”