“No; she made me take them; and—oh, mamma! I have seen her mamma—she was here just now—such a lovely lady! And Virgie says she lost her papa when she was a little baby—he was drownded.”
“Drowned, you mean, Willie,” corrected the lady; “how sad! but perhaps you ought not to talk about it, dear,” she added tenderly, as she bent forward and softly stroked Virgie’s glossy hair with her jeweled hand.
There were tears in her eyes as she said it, and though Virgie, in her hiding place behind the draperies, could not see these, she could hear the slight tremulousness in her tones, and she knew that she was a tender-hearted, sympathetic woman.
She then began to talk about something else and thus led their minds away from the sad topic until in a few moments they were laughing in the merriest manner—the childish voices ringing out fresh and clear, that of the beautiful woman like a silver bell.
Virgie saw and heard all with the keenest pain in her heart and though a torturing jealousy filled her soul—a sense of wrong and humiliation—from the belief that another had supplanted her in the heart and home of the man she loved, yet she could but own the worth, the beauty, and the fascination of that sweet, womanly woman who seemed so unconscious of wrong, whose heart was so full of tenderness and sympathy for the sorrows of others.
Oh, if, as she stood behind those curtains peering out upon that merry, attractive group, she could have known how very near she was just then to happiness and an explanation of all the dark past, she never would have concealed herself as she did. She would have made herself known; she would have sought rather than shunned that beautiful woman in white, and learned the mistake that had so embittered the last ten years of her life.
But she could more resolutely have faced a wild beast than those pure, innocent eyes and that happy smile. At first she had thought that she would go down to dinner, she would assert herself and make her presence a living reproach to the guilty pair.
But now she knew she could not; her strength would fail her, and she only longed for an opportunity to steal away unobserved to her room and hide her wretchedness once more from every human eye.
She turned away from that pretty tableau where her darling was so happy, and gazed out upon the street beneath her; but she saw nothing, heard nothing, for the tumult within her heart and brain.
She was conscious of nothing else till a movement almost beside her caused her to turn suddenly, and she found herself face to face with William Heath’s wife.