"Yes; I have told Mr. Varick," and then all at once she exclaimed: "Oh, Miss Farrow, I feel so utterly miserable! Mr. Varick has just asked me to be his wife, and it has made me feel as if I had been so treacherous to Milly. Yet I don't think I did anything to make him like me? Do you think I did?"
She looked appealingly at Blanche.
It was plain that what had happened had given her an extraordinary shock. "I am sure, now," she went on falteringly, "that Milly—poor, poor Milly—haunts this house. I have felt, again and again, as if she were hovering about me. I believe that what I saw in the hall, on that awful afternoon, was really her. Yet Mr. Varick says that Milly would be very pleased if he and I were to marry each other. Surely he is mistaken?"
"Yes," said Blanche slowly, "I think he is."
"I feel so miserable," went on the girl, still speaking with a touch of excitement which in her was so very unusual. "What happened this morning has spoiled what I thought was such a beautiful friendship! And then I feel frightened—horribly frightened"—she went on in a low voice.
"What is it that frightens you, Helen?" asked Blanche.
These confidences seemed at once so futile, and yet also so sinister, knowing what she now knew.
"I'm afraid that Mr. Varick will 'will' me into thinking I care for him," the girl confessed in a low voice. "He says that he will never give up hope, and that, although he knows he isn't worthy of me, he thinks that in time I shall care for him. But I don't want to care for him, Miss Farrow—I'm sure that Milly is jealous of me; yet at Redsands, when she was dying, it made her happy that we were friends."
"I don't think you need be afraid that Lionel will ever ask you to marry him again," said Blanche firmly. "And, Helen? Let me give you a word of advice. Never, never, tell anyone of what happened to you this morning."
The girl blushed painfully. "I know I ought not to have told you," she whispered, "but I felt so wretched." She hesitated, and then added: "Ever since it happened I have been remembering that first evening, when my dear father warned me to leave this house. Oh, how I wish I had done what he told me to do!"