Dotting the public rooms with little groups, engrossed in cards, knitting, and placid prattle, these took only casual account of the flying transit of that vision of elegance and youthful charm with evening wrap caught high about the pretty face. Such sightly shapes were too much a commonplace of their deliberate and self-sufficient days, and always passed in haste; as young blood does ever, irrationally enough, having so much time before it, so little patience....
So, though she knew them for a pack of greedy scandal scavengers, and conceived every eye among them to be regardful of her and all her shifts to deceive them spent for naught, not one who observed her guessed with what agitation she was a-quake, what unrelenting urgency whipped on her feet till they all but stumbled in their eagerness to find her sanctuary behind locked doors, where she might ease off at last the tension of self-control, pillow her sore and aching head, and give range to the pent tempest of emotions brewed by love thwarted and chagrined, faith confounded, dreams done shamefully to death....
Fleeting free of that gauntlet, she gave a sigh to find herself in the quiet corridor leading to her apartment. How good it was to think she would in another minute be alone, what an inspiration had been hers when, looking forward to an evening long drawn out, she had given her maid liberty till morning!
She passed the door through which she once had ventured to discover Nelly Marquis lying in a faint brought about by Lynn's cruelty.... And now what would become of that one? Whither had she turned in her flight? with what hope of asylum or immunity? A hapless creature beating blindly through the night, a land-bird swept to sea by an off-shore gale, questing what it might never hope to find....
Lucinda slipped into her sitting-room, turned the key, found the switchbox near the door, and in an abrupt blaze of illumination stood, startled beyond speech, face to face with the woman the riddle of whose fate had been riding her imagination.
One of Nelly's hands was planted flat against the wall; but this support helped not at all to abate the vicious racking of her body by nerves deranged. The other, a begrimed fist, was fumbling at her mouth. Those eyes whose haunted beauty had first laid claim to one's humanity were now—their blazing madness of a short hour since dispelled—black pools of pathos in a face whose chalkiness was runneled by tears and framed in hair like tarred rope unravelled. Her dress of hackneyed smartness was bedraggled, the skirt marked by knees that in some fall had ground into loam. The black satin slippers were pale with dust, and the openwork stockings, which boasted two great tears as well.
In that first flash of affrighted recognition, Lucinda started back to the door and fumbled for the key, but had yet to find it when the woman plunged down to grovel at her feet, catching at her knees, lifting up a face of torment, supplicating against teeth that chattered as if with an acute ague.
"O Mrs. Druce, Mrs. Druce! I'm all right now, I am, I swear I am! Forgive me, and for God's sake don't turn me out, don't call the police!"
Still frightened and mistrustful, Lucinda yet held her hand on the knob. "What do you want?" she asked in a voice that shook.
"Just to talk to you a minute.... Don't be afraid...."