And Violet’s sympathetic tone responds:
“I think she likes you, Will. Shall I tell you why? Because, although she laughs at you when you attempt to enact the lover, just let any one venture a slighting remark concerning you, and she will fly into a passion and defend you with all her might. Jessie Glyndon is a peculiar woman—the very proudest woman I ever knew. But a woman doesn’t hate a man whom she watches with her very soul in her eyes. An hour ago, Will, I found her in the rose arbor all alone. She was watching you in the distance—you were flirting awfully with some one, you naughty boy!—and I heard her say, believing herself all alone, ‘Dear Will—dear old Dark Eyes! He will never know—never know!’”
“Did she?”
Will Venners’ hand closes eagerly down upon Violet’s small gloved hand, and Leonard Yorke’s jealous eyes observe the action.
“Did she really, Miss Violet? And yet she was so cold to me. Miss Violet, will you give her this? It is a little poem I wrote for her.”
“With pleasure.”
A folded sheet of paper fluttered from Will Venners’ hand into Violet’s grasp; she hid it in the lace of her corsage.
“I will give it to Jessie to-night if possible,” Violet says, softly; “and now you had better take me back to the house; I must go and see mamma for a moment; I am afraid she is ill.”
As the words pass her lips she lifts her eyes and they rest upon two figures strolling leisurely on in the moonlight—Leonard Yorke, her lover, and at his side Hilda Rutledge. Something in their attitude makes a cold chill creep over Violet’s heart; she turns away and hastens to the house.
In the entrance hall she pauses and glances eagerly about her in search of Jessie Glyndon. She sees her at last, a brown-haired young woman with blue-gray eyes and an air of quiet dignity which some people considered out of place, for she was only a dependent, the hired companion to Leonard Yorke’s mother, and had lived at Yorke Towers for a year.