When she held, the mirror in a thin hand, and compared its reflection with Yvonne herself with critical eyes, the girl grasped her true intent. Her abundant hair, only a shade darker than Yvonne's own brown tresses, framed the well poised head and slender neck. Distress and lack of solid food had lent a pallor to cheeks and forehead which had the curious effect of rendering the clear-cut features strikingly youthful. Mouth and chin had a certain quality of hardness and obstinacy not discernible in the girl's face. Otherwise they resembled sisters rather than mother and daughter.
"Yvonne," she said wistfully, "if we say we are strangers, no one will believe. I shall invent a twin sister. You are my niece. I quarreled with my sister because she married an impoverished painter. Thin ice; but it must carry us. Your father has done the wisest possible thing in leaving Pont Aven today. He refuses to forgive my shabby treatment of a sister; but Christian charity impels him not to forbid you from visiting me. Don't volunteer this information. Let it be dragged from you unwillingly. It is a cruel thing that my first advice to you should be a lesson in duplicity; but I have earned that sort of scourge, and must endure. Now you understand. We are aunt and niece. Don't be surprised if I act a little when the nurse returns. By the way, write to your father and tell him what I have said. I'm sure he will approve, and the fact that I am eager to make this small atonement for the wrong I did him will show that I still retain some sense of fair dealing."
"Yes, Dear, I'll write today. I don't think it is very wicked to adopt a pretense that enables me to visit you without—without setting idle tongues wagging."
"Without causing a village scandal, you might well have said," came the bitter retort. "Very well, Yvonne, I will not say such things," for the girl winced at the unerring judgment that supplied the words that had nearly escaped her. "Now let us talk of other matters. Tell me something of yourself. Where and how do you live? Why are you wearing that costume? Do you dress like that habitually? And how wonderfully it becomes you! Talk, Dear, and I'll listen, and if I fall asleep when you are talking don't imagine that I am heedless and inattentive; for I have been brought nearer happiness in this hour than I would have believed possible yesterday. Do you realize that the wreck was directly due to my folly? The captain wished to put into the Aven estuary when the storm became very bad; but I refused to permit it. Wallie—that is Mr. Carmac—always yielded to my whims, and he imagined I preferred Lorient to Pont Aven. I didn't. I knew that your father lived here. His art proved more enduring than a woman's faith. It has made him famous; though I had the cruelty, the impertinence, to tell him once that he would never emerge from the ruck. I never heard of you. For some reason I thought you had died in infancy. Yvonne, Heaven forgive me, I may even have wished it! But you see now why I wanted to avoid Pont Aven. As though any of God's creatures can resist when He points the way!"
So it was the mother who did most of the talking, and the daughter who listened, with never a word of reproach, and not even a hint that had a wilful and conscience-tortured woman not imposed her imperious will on the Stella's course the yacht would have ridden the gale in safety in a roadstead five miles removed from the village of Pont Aven itself!
When Madame Bertrand bustled in her patient was asleep, and Yvonne's cheeks were tear-stained.
"Poor lady!" murmured the Breton woman. "She's nothing but a bundle of nerves. All night long, after the effect of the bromide had passed, she kept crying out for her daughter—meaning you, Mademoiselle. What a notion! Yet you are so alike!"
"With good reason, Madame," said the girl. "She is my mother's sister. There was a family quarrel years ago. Please keep this to yourself; though Madame Carmac will probably tell you of it later."
Yvonne was glad, when her father's letter arrived, to find that he agreed with the little deception, which hurt none, and explained away the seemingly inexplicable.