Thea turned her face listlessly a moment on the pillow and stared at the intruders, then sprung to her feet with a startled cry.
The nurse had not returned. Two strange white faces were there instead of Mary’s familiar black one. Their eyes swept Thea’s face and the room with a sort of insolent contempt.
A thrill of indescribable terror went through the girl’s supple frame, and just then the foremost woman spoke. She pointed a slender gloved hand at the crib, and asked, sharply, angrily:
“Whose child is that?”
“It is mine,” Thea answered, with such pride in her tone and cresting her golden head with so queenly an air that the woman lifted her hand with a gesture of threatening, as if to strike her down at her feet.
Thea saw it, but she did not falter. A sudden courage had come to her in this moment which she subtly felt to be full of some unexplained peril to herself.
She gazed fixedly at the foremost woman, a tall, graceful creature, clothed in soft, lusterless silk, with a bonnet of shining jet set lightly on a head of beautiful wavy red hair. The handsome face beneath was no longer young, but Thea thought it looked like the faces of women she had seen in Paris, enameled and made up to be beautiful forever by the artistes in that profession. But the great reddish-hazel eyes had a fire all their own, and they glared upon the beautiful young wife as if they would destroy her with their baleful light.
“The child is yours?” she uttered, in a low and hissing voice. “And you?”
“I am Mrs. de Vere,” was the proud reply.
“Norman de Vere’s wife?”