While Eweretta ate in the lamplight, Mattie talked to her of Canada.
All at once the servant caught sight of a red streak showing through the muslin of Eweretta’s blouse.
“Oh, you poor lamb!” she cried, with tears springing to her eyes. “Did he do that?”
“Yes,” answered Eweretta with a fiery flash from her splendid eyes. “I called him a coward and he struck me.”
Mattie insisted on bathing the broken skin, accompanying her work with invectives on the cruel monster who had inflicted it.
“It’s the drink,” she said.
“My old lover came here to-day,” burst from Eweretta, while her tears fell. “I saw him! Oh, Mattie, won’t you help me to escape? You are so kind!”
Mattie set her teeth hard. She believed this was a delusion of the poor girl’s about her lover. She knew the story of the supposed dead Eweretta, and that the girl she really believed to be Aimée Le Breton now imagined herself to be her dead sister.
“Ah, where would you go, honey, if I did?” she answered, “and what would become of you?”
“I should go to Philip Barrimore,” Eweretta answered with great decision. “I don’t want my father’s money. Uncle Thomas and Mrs. Le Breton are welcome to it. It was to obtain that money that they pretended I died; and it was my half-sister who died. We were so much alike that one might easily be mistaken for the other. I remember well Uncle Thomas taking me to see Aimée die. The next thing I remember is finding myself in a strange place out on the prairie. I was dressed in Aimée’s clothes. They told me I was Aimée. They said ‘Eweretta died suddenly, and is buried.’ Ever since then they have pretended that I am Aimée. They drug me to make me stupid. Am I stupid to-night? You can’t think so. I am myself because I have touched no food or drink that they have offered to me.”