She presented a card to her mistress, and Olive read the name of "Paul Wyndham." She turned sick at sight of that name—that name so lately heard for the first time, but so terribly familiar now; and looked at the girl with a sort of terror in her great black eyes.
"Is this man—is this Mr. Wyndham here?"
"Down in the drawing-room, Miss, and his overcoat and umbrella making little streams of rain-water all along the hall. Will you go down, Miss?"
Olive Henderson's hand had closed on the pasteboard with so convulsive a pressure, that the card was crushed into a shapeless mass. Her stupor was ending in a sort of sullen desperation. Let the worst come, it was Fate; and she was powerless to battle with so formidable a foe. Whatever brought this man now, his coming was merciful; the most dreadful certainty was better than this horrible suspense, which had made the past night a century of misery.
Rosie, the pretty housemaid, watched her young lady's changing face, as she walked rapidly up and down, her eyes staring straight before her with a fierce and feverish luster, and her lips so rigidly set. Rosie saw all this, and greatly marveled thereat. A gentleman had called very early on a very wet morning; but that was no reason why Miss Henderson should be prancing up and down her room, with the look of an inmate of a lunatic asylum.
"Will I tell him you'll come down, Miss?" Rosie ventured to ask, when she thought the silence had lasted long enough.
The voice of the girl drew Olive out of her darkly-brooding fit, and she turned to close her door.
"Yes," she said. "Tell him I will be down in five minutes."
She walked to the glass, and looked at herself. I dare say Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots did the same before they were led to the block; and I doubt if either wore a more ghostly face at that horrible moment than the girl standing there did now. She smiled in bitter scorn of herself, as she saw the haggard face and the hollow, burning eyes.
"I look as if I had grown old in a night," she said. "Where is the beauty now that so many have praised since I came here?"