Miss Burnaby got up slowly, deliberately, from her chair near the fire. She also came up to her niece.
"You were working up to the very moment you cried out," she said positively. "I had turned round and I was watching you—when suddenly you jumped up and gave that dreadful cry."
"Do tell us what frightened you," said Varick solicitously.
"Please don't ask me what I saw—or thought I saw; I would rather not tell you," Helen said in a low voice.
"But of course you must tell us!" Miss Burnaby roused herself, and spoke with a good deal of authority. "If you are not well you ought to see a doctor, my dear child."
Helen burst into bitter sobs. "I thought I saw Milly, Mr. Varick—poor, poor Milly! She looked exactly as she looked when I last saw her, in her coffin, excepting that her eyes were open. She was standing just behind you—and oh, I shall never, never forget her look! It was a terrible, terrible look—a look of hatred. Yet I cared for her so much! You know I did all that was possible for one woman to do for another during those few weeks that I knew her?"
Lionel Varick's face turned a curious, greyly pallid tint. It was as if all the natural colour was drained out of it.
"Where's Bubbles?" he asked, in a scarcely audible voice.
For a moment no one answered him, and then Blanche said quietly: "Bubbles is over there, in the confessional, asleep."
He turned and walked quickly over to the carved, box-like confessional, and drew aside the green-embroidered curtain.