“Then I will go and send her away,” Mae cried quickly, rising to her feet and moving unhindered to the door.
Another moment and the beautiful rivals stood face to face, but both changed and saddened since that night when they had so balefully crossed each other’s lives.
Viola flung back the somber folds of crape, and her face, pale and pure as carved pearl, framed in short curls of the silken hair ruthlessly shorn in the cruel fever, beamed on Mae with a plaintive smile as she asked:
“Do you remember me? I have come to see you and Mrs. Maxwell.”
“How ill and changed she looks! Did she love Rolfe after all?” thought Mae; but aloud she answered, coldly: “Yes, I remember you, but we—that is, my aunt—begs to be excused.”
“Do you mean that she will not see me?” Viola cried, apprehensively, the color flushing through her pale, transparent face like light within a crystal globe.
“She will not see you, because you were cruel to our poor Rolfe,” Mae returned, indignantly, her soft blue eyes beginning to flash and glow.
Viola recoiled as if the angry girl had struck her a blow, her face paling, great burning tears flashing into her dark, somber eyes, her voice trembling as she faltered:
“Oh, she must not refuse me! I must see her, if only once! I promised him, and I must keep my word!”
Pushing Mae aside in her pretty, imperious fashion, Viola glided into the hall and into the presence of the sobbing woman drooping so forlornly in her arm-chair.