With a sudden womanly comprehension, born of her own pain, she turned to her cousin, no radiant apparition as of yesterday, but trembling, haggard, dishevelled almost in her excitement and agony, yet more beautiful than ever in that abandonment.
"I wish he loved you, Lossie," cried Gay breathlessly. "I do wish it with all my heart, and it is quite true what you say—that you are much better suited to him than I am."
"Give me the chance," cried Lossie, clasping her hands together in desperate entreaty. "He can't know how I love, how I adore him; if he did, and that just as I love him, you love Chris, he couldn't help loving me."
"But I don't love Chris like that," protested Gay, shrinking a little from this woman whose eyes, lips, voice were passion incarnate; instinctively she knew that a man prefers to find most of the vehemence himself....
A servant knocked at the door, and announced that Mr. Mackrell was in the drawing-room, and the impulse, swift as a bird's homing flight, that took Lossie half-way across the room to go to him, startled Gay—just so would she have sped to Chris had all been well between them—and had not love his rights; was not Rensslaer only but now insisting on them?
"Lossie," she said, "if you can convince Carlton that your love will make him happier than my"—she hesitated—"affection can, go to him now."
But Lossie, turning even whiter, trembled, and shook her head.
"I daren't," she said in a whisper, "it must come from you. He would never forgive me—only if you were Chris's wife, I might have a chance.... Oh, Gay, I've been a beast to you often, but you've had all the luck, and I've had none"—she was like a passionate child clamouring for the toy that she coveted, thought her cousin, it was a bright, expensive toy that Gay did not want herself, she only wanted her dear old rag doll, for so she at that moment absurdly designated Chris.
"Carlton must decide," she said, and went with lagging steps to the drawing-room, where her lover very quickly did, for he stepped up close, held her fast, and kissed her—kissed her like a man who had long starved for that moment, and could not take enough.
As she tore herself away, she could have wept to think that the first kiss of her lips was not for Chris, and the contrast of Carlton, supremely handsome and happy, with the girl she had just left, revolted her. Her voice was strange as she said,