"It was the sight of the blood," Reine stammers. "I was frightened. You are very ill, are you not?"
Mrs. Odell, who has sunk wearily into a chair by her bedside, looks down at her with a ghastly smile on her blood-stained lips.
"Oh, no," she answers, with the hopeful confidence peculiar to that flattering disease, consumption, "my lungs are a little weak, that is all my trouble. The sea air and the Italian climate will quite restore my health, I think. The American climate is too harsh for me. I shall be better at Mentone."
"You will make your home there?" Reine asks, and Mrs. Odell answers readily:
"Yes, until my health is restored. Then I shall return to my native land. There is no place like America to me. Besides, all my property is there."
"Your friends and relatives, too?" Reine asks, and Mrs. Odell answers, sighing:
"Relatives I have none. My husband and children have all gone before to the better land. My friends are few. A woman as rich as I am does not know how to trust in friendship. Only think, child, my husband has left me two millions of dollars, and I have neither kith nor kin of my own to leave it to. I am utterly alone in the world."
"As I was until I met—Vane," Reine murmurs silently to herself, while a look of sympathy flashes from her beautiful eyes upon the lonely rich woman.
"The friend I cared most for on earth," Mrs. Odell continues, sadly, "was my maid, who died just a few days before you were rescued. She was a girl of culture and refinement, rather above her position, and a friend, rather than a servant. I have missed her sadly, as much for her company as her services."
"Did she die suddenly?" Reine asks, with a sigh for the poor girl who had found a watery grave far from her native land.