“No, dear,” replied Winnie, turning her face toward Leslie but keeping her eyes averted; “no, I do not believe that Archibald guessed. He was too true and frank himself to suspect any form of falsity in another.”
“Falsity!” Leslie rose slowly to her feet, her face fairly livid.
Winnie also arose, and seizing one of Leslie’s hands began, in a broken voice:
“Leslie, forgive the word! Oh, from the very first, I have known your secret, and pitied you. I knew it because—because I, too, am a woman, and can read a woman’s heart. But Archibald never guessed it, and Alan—”
She broke off abruptly, wringing her hands as if tortured by her own words.
But Leslie coldly completed the sentence. “Alan! He knows it?”
“Oh, yes. It began by his doubting your love for his brother, and then—the knowledge—that you cared—for him—”
Across Leslie’s pallid face the red blood came surging, and a bitter cry broke from her lips; a cry that bore with it all her constrained calmness.
“That I cared!” she repeated wildly. “Winnifred French, what are you saying! God of Heaven! is that madness known, too?”
She flung herself upon the divan, her form shaken by a passion of voiceless sobs.