"Then you shall have it to-night," she said, with strange, cold calmness. "I promised Miss Blair to go to the theater—you will see me there, and shall have your answer."
Mr. Wyndham bowed, and with a simple "Good morning," walked out of the room. As he shut the door behind him, he felt as though he were shutting Olive Henderson in a living tomb, and he her jailer.
"Poor girl! poor girl!" he was thinking, as he put on his overcoat; "what a villain I must seem in her eyes, and what a villain I am, ever to have consented to this. But it is only retribution after all—one ill turn deserves another."
Paul Wyndham walked to his hotel through the drenching rain and cold sea-wind, and Olive Henderson listened to the tumult of the storm, with another storm quite as tumultuous in her own breast.
The play that night was the "Lady of Lyons." There is only one theater in Speckport, so Mr. Wyndham was not likely to get bewildered in his search. The first act was half over when he came in, and looked round the dress circle, and down in the orchestra stalls. In the glare of the gaslight Olive Henderson looked superb. Never had her magnificent black eyes shone with such streaming luster as to-night, and a crimson glow, quite foreign to her usual complexion, beamed on either cheek—the crimson glow, rouge, worn for the first time in her life; and though she was a New York lady, she had the grace to be ashamed of the paint, and wear a thin black vail over her face. She took her eyes off Mademoiselle Pauline for a moment, to fix them on Mr. Wyndham, who came along to pay his respects, and to find a seat directly behind that of the heiress, but she only bent her head in very distant acknowledgment of his presence, and looked at Pauline again.
The curtain fell on the first act. Miss Henderson was very thirsty—that feverish thirst had not left her yet, and Captain Cavendish went out for a glass of ice-water. Laura was busy chattering to Mr. Blake, and Paul Wyndham bent forward and spoke to the heiress, who never turned her head.
"I have come for my answer, Miss Henderson," he said; "it is 'Yes,' I know."
"It is 'Yes,' Mr. Wyndham, and, with my consent, take the knowledge that I hate and despise you more than any other creature on the face of the earth."
She never turned while saying this. She stared straight before her at the row of gleaming footlights. The music was croaking out, every one was talking busily, and not one of the young ladies who looked enviously at the beautiful and brilliant heiress, nor the men who worshiped her at a distance, and who hated the young New Yorker for the privilege he enjoyed of talking to her—not one of them all dreamed ever so faintly of that other play being enacted off the stage.
Captain Cavendish came back with the water, the play went on, but I doubt if Olive Henderson heard a word, or knew whether they were playing "Othello" or the "Lady of Lyons," but none of the others knew that; that serviceable mask, the human face, is a very good screen for the heart.