But there was not, and it surprised her to know how much she was disappointed.
“Even Clay has forgotten me,” she said as she arose hastily to go.
A big sob sprang up into her throat and the Conway light of defiance, that had blazed but a few moments before in her eyes, died in the depths of the cloud of tears which poured between it and the open.
A cruel, dangerous mood came over her. It enveloped her soul in its sombre hues and the steel of it struck deep.
She scarcely remembered her dead mother—only her eyes. But when these moods came upon Helen Conway—and her life had been one wherein they had fallen often—the memory of her mother's eyes came to her and stood out in the air before her, and they were sombre and sad, and full, too, of the bitterness of hopes unfulfilled.
All her life she had fought these moods when they came. But now—now she yielded to the subtle charm of them—the wild pleasure of their very sinfulness.
“And why not,” she cried to herself when the consciousness of it came over her, and like a morphine fiend carrying the drug to his lips, she knew that she also was pressing there the solace of her misery.
“Why should I not dissipate in the misery of it, since so much of it has fallen upon me at once?
“Mother?—I never knew one—only the eyes of one, and they were the eyes of Sorrow. Father?”—she waved her hand toward the old home—“drunk-wrecked—he would sell me for a quart of whiskey.
“Then I loved—loved an image which is—mud—mud”—she fairly spat it out. “One poor friend I had—I scorned him, and he has forgotten me, too. But I did know that I had social standing—that my name was an honored one until—now.”