From an upper window Mrs. Vance was watching for the young man's departure. She started as she saw him drive off with Ada beside him, and a lurid fire of rage and jealousy blazed in her heart.
"The fair-faced little devil!" she muttered, clenching her hands tightly together. "Oh! that I dared to murder her as I did that other one who came between me and him!"
She paced up and down, wild with contending passions.
"I was wrong to leave them together," she thought, in bitter anger with herself. "He was glad, perhaps, that I came away and left them to an uninterrupted tete-a-tete. I over-reached myself that time; but, ah! Ada Lawrence, woe be unto you if you win him from me!"
The postman's impatient rattling at the door-bell interrupted her angry mood. In a moment a maid rapped at the door, delivered a letter to her and went away.
Mrs. Vance had no correspondents usually. She guessed, with a sharp quiver of anger and fear, whence it came, and held it at arm's length a moment as if it had been a noxious reptile.
"The greedy old harpy," she muttered indignantly, tearing it open at last. "Must she bleed me again so soon?"
She tore the coarse, yellow envelope into a hundred little bits, then angrily scanned the note in her hand. It was very brief, but amounted to an imperative summons from Haidee Leveret to come to the old house to-morrow and bring all the money she could raise.