"I cannot do that," said Bonnibel, hurriedly. "It is impossible for me to marry Colonel Carlyle—there are many reasons why I should not. As to the other, I will——"
She was about to add, "I will go away from here," but a sickening thought flashed across her. Where could she go?
She had no relative to fly to in her trouble. She did not know how to work and take care of herself. She had never learned anything useful, and her education had been mostly limited to those showy, superficial accomplishments in vogue in the fashionable world. She had five hundred fashionable friends, but not one to whom she could turn for comfort in this her dark hour.
"You say you cannot marry Colonel Carlyle," said Mrs. Arnold, breaking in on her troubled silence. "Listen to the only alternative that is left you. I give you until he returns for his answer to decide in. If you do not then accept him you shall no longer have the shelter of my roof. Yes, in the very hour that you refuse Carlyle's millions, I will turn you out homeless into the streets!"
Into the streets! How the words grated on the girl's horrified hearing. She had seen them take up a dead girl from the street once, a girl as young and fair almost as herself.
They said she had poisoned herself because she had no home. They took her away to the Morgue, but Bonnibel had never forgotten that fair, still face as it lay cold in death.
She recalled it now with a shiver. Some one had turned the poor girl into the streets to die. Would that be her fate?
A deadly weakness stole over her. She dropped into a chair like one shot, and Mrs. Arnold as she stood near her could hear the loud, wild beating of her heart. Her little white hands trembled, and her cheeks and lips turned white as marble.
"Aunt Arnold," she said, looking up at the cruel, relentless woman, "you would not do that, surely? I should have nowhere to go, and I am so terribly afraid of the night and the darkness in the dreadful streets of the city!"
"No matter," sneered the listener. "You can go to one of the finest houses in the city if you like, and have every luxury that wealth can command—but if you refuse that, out you go from under the shelter of this roof!"