"Dead!" Ivy screams in passionate wrath. "Dead—and the embroidery not finished on my Surah polonaise! It is just like her—the lazy, ungrateful thing! To go and die just when I needed——"
But Vera slams the door between her and the rest of the heartless lament, and flies along the hall laughing like some mad thing. In truth the horrors of this dreadful night have almost unseated her reason. She shuts and bolts herself into her room, her young heart filled with wild hatred for her heartless cousin.
"To-morrow I shall have my revenge upon her," she cries, with clenched hands. "I would not tell her to-night. My triumph would not have been complete. I will wait—wait until to-morrow, when Leslie Noble will take me by the hand and tell her to her face that he loves me, and that I am his wife!"
And her strange, half-maddened laugh filled the little room with weird echoes.
[CHAPTER III.]
To-morrow, Vera's to-morrow—dawns, rainy, chilly, cheerless, as only a rainy autumn day can be. The wild winds sigh eerily around the house. The autumn leaves are beaten from the trees and swirl through the air, falling in dank, sodden masses on the soaked grass of the lawn. The sun refuses to shine. No more dreary and desolate day could be imagined.
With the earliest peep of dawn Vera makes her way to her mother's room.
It is lonely and deserted save for the sheeted presence of the quiet dead. The lamps burn dimly, and there is a silence in the room so deep it may be felt.
With a trembling hand Vera turns down the cold linen cover for one long, lingering look at the beloved face—the strangely-beautiful marble-white face, on which the story of a life-long sorrow has carved its mournful record in the subtle tracery of grief.