"Now, how ever could you guess that?"
"Because," said Madeline, in a constrained voice, and with all the laughter fading from her eyes; "Because, I know the symptoms."
"I see," dropping her voice suddenly. "Oh, Madeline, how I wish you could forget that."
"Why should I forget my love dream," scornfully, "any more than you yours?"
"Oh, Madeline; but you said you had ceased to care for him; that you should never mourn his loss."
"Mourn his loss!" turning upon Claire, fiercely. "Do you think it is for him I mourn my dead; my lost happiness, my shattered dreams, my life made a bitter, burdensome thing. Mourn him? I have for Lucian Davlin but one feeling—hate!"
Madeline, as she uttered these last words, had turned upon Claire a face whose fierce intensity of expression was startling. For a moment the two gazed into each other's eyes—the one with curling lip and somber, menacing glance, the other with a startled face as if she read something new and to be feared, in the eye of her friend.
Claire had been an inmate of her sister's house for four weeks. When first she arrived, she had heard Madeline's story, at Madeline's request, from the lips of her sister Olive, and now the girls were fast friends. Generous Claire had found much to wonder at, to pity and to love, in the story and the character of the unfortunate girl. Possessing a frank, sunshiny nature, and never having known an actual grief, she could lavish sweet sympathy to one afflicted. But she could not conceive what it would be like to live on when faith had perished and hope was a mockery. She had never known, therefore never missed, a father's love and care. Indeed, he who filled the place of father and guardian, her mother's second husband, was all that a real parent could be. Claire seldom remembered that Mr. James Keith was not her father, and very few, except the family of Keith, knew that "Miss Claire Keith, daughter of the rich James Keith, of Baltimore," was in truth only a step-daughter.
Mrs. Keith, whose first husband was Richard Keith, cashier in his wealthy cousin's banking house, had buried that husband when Olive was five years old, and baby Claire scarce able to lisp his name. In a little less than two years she had married James Keith, the banker-cousin, and shortly after the marriage, James Keith had transferred his business interests to Baltimore, and there remained.
So Claire's baby brothers had never been told that she was not their "very own" sister, for of Olive they knew little, her marriage having separated them at first, and subsequently her obdurate acceptance of the consequences of that marriage.