"She would not have you for her servant even, if once she found out the truth about you," argued sensible Clarice. "Miss Vane, I do not know what to think of this sudden fancy of yours. What would Miss Beatrix—I mean Mrs. Wentworth, say if she could hear you?"
"Clarice, I have served her ends and she can have no right to reproach me if I take my own way now," said the girl. "And indeed it is far better for me not to go. Mr. Wentworth is a poor man. Why should I burden him with my support? They will do better without me. Oh, Clarice, dear, kind Clarice," she flung herself suddenly on her knees before the perplexed maid and grasped her dress imploringly, "let me have my way in this! Go to Mrs. Wentworth and leave me here! Beg her not to betray the conspiracy yet. Tell her to be kind to me, to let me stay as long as I can before they find me out in my wickedness!"
"And then," said Clarice, gravely, "what will you do after that?"
"Then—the deluge," Laurel answered, recklessly.
They spent an hour in heated argument. Laurel was desperately resolved not to leave Eden, if possible. Her tears, her prayers, conquered Clarice's better judgment. The end of it all was, that Clarice gave in to her plans, and promised to influence Beatrix Wentworth to withhold her promised letters of confession to the Gordons and the Le Roys.
"But I must say one thing, Miss Vane, in spite of your anger," said the maid, sturdily. "If you have laid a plan to marry the master of Eden, I will betray you if it is at the front of the altar. You must not dare carry the farce that far! You are beautiful and young; but you are no mate for the proud, rich master of Eden. If you married him and he found out the cheat afterward, he would make you the most wretched woman under the sun!"
Afterward, Laurel recalled the maid's words as if they had been some fateful prophecy, instead of the wise utterance of a clear-headed woman.
"You need not threaten me, Clarice," she said, with girlish dignity. "I have laid no plans—not one. I have not thought about the future. I only could not bear to go away. I know Mr. Le Roy could never think of me—that way! I—have never even dreamed of it. Do not judge me so harshly, Clarice. Remember how young I am. Is it strange that I should love the only happy home I ever had?"
Clarice could not resist her beauty, her pleadings, her distress. She smoothed the golden hair tenderly, and kissed the white hands, and admitted that she was sorry for Laurel Vane. But she said to herself, all the same, that she was acting wrong in leaving the girl at Eden in her borrowed plumes. Harm would come of it—harm to the beautiful, willful creature who was so blindly rushing upon her fate.
That evening Laurel told Mrs. Le Roy that Clarice had received an offer to accompany a lady to Europe, and that the girl had determined to accept it, and would leave her on the next day to go to New York.