How could she ever face Aunt Edwina’s gentle surprise and persistent curiosity, her father’s wrath, and the wonder and the veiled mockery of her little social world?
She had been so proud, so haughty—and now her pride was leveled in the dust.
And she was too angry for repentance, too resentful to accept her fate.
A passionate longing to punish Desha for his desertion throbbed at her heart, but alas! she was helpless. With Florian’s help she might have done it—might still have been wedded to-morrow, and turned the exchange of bridegrooms into a jest, baffling the world’s curiosity, and thwarting Desha’s intentions—but now the thought of to-morrow drove her mad. How could she face its keen humiliation and live?
She to whom life had always been so fair and beautiful suddenly found it a dark and gloomy spot from which she shrank in blind terror, madly longing for death.
“I wish I was dead!” she groaned in her tearless despair and dread of to-morrow.
She felt a terrible loneliness, a feeling that there was no one on earth to whom she could turn for help or pity in this dark, dark hour when all the joy of her life had fallen to her feet in ruins.
She rose, pacing up and down the floor with interlocked hands and blazing eyes. Half crazed with the sudden shock of trouble, Viola’s thoughts took a sudden, desperate turn, paltered with an awful temptation.
She murmured hollowly:
“I can not bear my pain and live! Death were better.”