She looked so pale and death-like that Reinette bent anxiously over her, and bringing the camphor bathed her forehead, and held it to her nostrils until she was better, and raising herself from the pillows upon which she had fallen, she said:
“I cannot lie here. I feel that I am smothering. I must get up, while I talk to you, but oh, you’ll be so sorry. You’ll wish you had never come. Bring me my wrapper there on the chair, and my woolen shawl, for I am shivering with cold.”
Her teeth were chattering, and her lips were blue and pinched as Queenie brought the wrapper and helped her put it on, kneeling on the floor to button it herself, and occasionally speaking soothingly to her, though her own heart was beating rapidly with a dread of what she might hear. Then it was that Margery appeared on the scene, and by suggesting that no one but themselves need know what had so long been hidden, changed Mrs. La Rue’s intentions altogether. For a few brief moments there had been in her mind a resolve to make a clean breast of it, and to tell the truth, and then when that was done, she would kill herself, and so escape the storm sure to follow her revelations.
“Better die,” she thought, “than live to be questioned and suspected by the Rossiters, and Fergusons, and everybody, as I should be if they knew I was Christine.”
But when the idea was suggested that only Margery and Reinette need know, she changed her mind, and in what she would now tell the latter, there was to be a deep, dark gulf bridged over in silence.
“Help me to my chair. I am very, very weak,” she said to Reinette, when Margery had gone.
Reinette complied with her request, and leading her to a chair placed her gently in it, and drew the shawl closer around her. At this little act of attention Christine broke down entirely, and throwing her arms around Reinette, sobbed out:
“Oh, my darling, my baby whom I nursed. I have so longed to hold you in my arms as I held you years ago. Reinette, Reinette, kiss me—because—because—I am—Christine.”
It was not in Reinette’s nature to resist such an appeal, and she kissed the poor trembling woman twice, and then drawing a chair to her side spoke very softly to her, and said:
“Now tell me.”