“I did not know that you were here, Miss Brand,” she said. “Have you not seen Mrs. Everard?”
“I have seen her,” Ellice said, “but I didn’t come here to-day to see her. I came to see you.”
“To see me?” Joan smiled—a conventional smile. “You will sit down, won’t you? Is it anything that I can do? It is not, I hope, that Mr. Everard is ill?”
“And—and if he were,” the girl cried, “would you care?”
Joan started, her face grew colder.
“I do not understand.”
“Yes, you—you do. Why are you marrying him? Why are you taking him from me when—”
“Taking him from—you?” Joan’s voice was like ice water on flames of fire. Ellice was silent.
“Miss Meredyth, I came here to-day to see you, to speak to you, to—to open my heart to you.” Her lips trembled. “Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I have no right to be here to say what I am going to say. I told Connie; she—she knows that I have come here, and she knows why.”
“Yes; go on.”