"Honestly no. I have told you the truth, plain and unvarnished."
Sybil stood as if transfixed with surprise, or some sudden inspiration.
"Why, how amazed you look, dear; after all it's an old, old trick, and easily played. Come, don't stare at me any longer; put away your diamonds and come below with me, my ponies must be dying with impatience, and I am anxious to avoid our mutual foe, for I make common cause with you, dear, and I have told you my secret, that we may be in very truth, fellow conspirators. Make my adieus to the family, and be sure and come to me just as you used; if your ogre insists upon coming, trust me to freeze him into an earnest desire to be in a warmer and more congenial place. Courage, mon ami, somehow we must win the battle."
Sybil took the diamonds from her hands and put them away, with far more care than she had displayed in bringing them forth; then she followed her friend from the room, closing and carefully locking the door behind her.
Constance observed the unusual caution, but made no comment. Only when many days after she remembered that day she wondered how she could have been so stupidly blind.
She effected her departure without being seen by Frank or Burrill, and drove homeward, revolving in her mind various plots for the confusion of the latter, and plans for awakening Sybil from the dangerous melancholy that would surely unseat her reason.
"If I could only move her to tears," she murmured, "only break that frozen calm once. How can I touch, move, melt her? It must be done." And pondering this difficult task, she drove slowly on.
"I wonder if I blundered in telling her my secret," she mused. "I know she will keep it; and yet, somehow, I fear I was too hasty. One would think it had grown too big for me to keep. But, pshaw! it's not a life and death matter, and I wanted to give a new impulse to that poor child's thoughts. But I must try and cure myself of this impulsiveness, just as if it were not 'bred in the bone,' for it was an impulse that made me whisper my secret to Sybil; and once, it has got me into serious trouble." And her brow darkened, as she thought of the feud thus raised between herself and Doctor Heath.
While she was thus pondering, Sybil Burrill had hurried back to her own room, locked herself in, and with hands clasped and working nervously, was pacing restlessly up and down, as Constance had done a little earlier.
"It's the only way," she muttered between shut teeth, "the only possible way." And then she unlocked the dressing case, took out her jewels once more, handling them with greatest care. She spread them out before her, and resting her elbows on the dressing table, and her chin in the palm of one slender hand, gazed and thought with darkening brow and compressed lips; and with now and then a shudder, and a startled glance behind and about her.