“Poor mamma! your head is bad again, isn’t it?” said her little girl, taking her hand and lifting it tenderly to her lips, while she looked pitifully into her white face.
“Yes, darling, and I shall have to lie down again; but you and your little friend may come in if you like,” she forced herself to say, as she feebly made her way to a lounge, and almost fell upon it, a deadly faintness nearly overpowering her.
“No, mamma; we will go out into the hall and play,” Virgie replied, while the young stranger regarded the stricken woman with wide, grave eyes. “I am going to get that box of toys that you bought me yesterday, then Willie and I will go away, and we will not make any noise, so you can sleep. Does your mamma ever have such dreadful headaches?” she asked of the boy.
“No, but papa does sometimes; then he has to stay in a dark room, and everybody has to keep as still as mice,” he answered.
It seemed to the suffering woman as if she could not suppress a moan of agony to hear the child call that man “papa,” and she wondered if he ever knew what it was to have such a heartache as she was at that moment suffering.
Little Virgie secured her box of playthings, and then the two children tiptoed out of the room, softly shutting the door after them, while Virgie lay another hour trying to compose herself and rally her shattered nerves.
She arose at last with the fixed determination to have one look at the man and woman whom she believed had ruined her life—just one glance to see how life had dealt with them, and then she would fly from all danger and temptation.
She arrayed herself in a lovely dress of black lace, made over rich lavender silk, and looped here and there with glistening ribbons of the same color. She had coiled her abundant hair in a coronet about her shapely head and pinned it with a golden arrow, in which there gleamed a single diamond. Her ornaments were of dead rough gold, fashioned in some quaint design, and she fastened in her belt a cluster of white acacia blossoms, which made a lovely contrast against the black and lavender of her dress.
She was exquisitely beautiful, and she realized the fact as she finished her toilet, and she could not help wondering what she—that other woman was like—the woman who had won her husband from her.
She could hear the merry voices of the children, who were still at their play in the hall, and a bitter smile curled her lips as she thought how unconscious they were of each other’s identity, or of the torture she was suffering to have them thus together, two rivals, she believed, for the same name and inheritance.