For Florine Dabol, as she stood there fingering the poison in her pocket and gazing at the lovely, sorrowful face, felt moved and troubled, and her feeling of her mistress’ helplessness found expression in an exclamation of profound remorse and pity:
“Poor baby!”
For Molly, in her youth, innocence, and grief, seemed like an infant, in the eyes of the maturer maid, and an intense repugnance to her contemplated horrible deed rushed over her soul.
She turned away and went into the dressing-room, dropping softly into a chair, that she might not awake the sleeper.
“I can’t—I can’t do it! I must find some other way to earn the money. I can’t have that poor thing’s blood on my soul! She would haunt me, and I should get no rest from those hollow black eyes!” she muttered, fearfully.
Evidently Florine’s good angel was pleading with her, for she sat there wrapped in thought while in the next room Molly slept sweetly, unconscious of the danger hovering near her in such deadly form.
An hour passed and Florine still sat in her chair, and now and then muttered words escaped her lips.
“She is so good and sweet and patient. She has never given me a cross word for all the dreadful lies I’ve told her about her splendid husband. How can I kill the gentle creature?”
She thought, suddenly:
“If I could only tell her something very dreadful, that would make her go away from The Acacias forever, it would be the same as killing her.”