“If he asked me, yes.”
“You traitor! An’ you a Webster!”
“I don’t care.”
The woman surveyed her niece in silence.
“Well,” she said finally, “you can put your soul at rest. Martin Howe will never marry you—never! He would no more marry anybody of the Webster blood than he’d hang himself. Go on lovin’ him if you want to. No good will come of it.”
With this parting prophecy Ellen shut her lips, and Lucy, throbbing from the stripes of the encounter and seeing further parley fruitless, slipped from the room and fled to the quiet of the still night’s solitude.
After she had gone and Ellen was once more in bed, Melvina tried in vain to quiet the increasing restlessness of her patient, but all 230 attempts to soothe the invalid were without avail. Tossing from side to side on the pillows, her fingers picking nervously at the coverings, Ellen stared into the darkness, breaking from time to time into fragments of angry dialogue.
The benediction of the evening’s peace, musical with the rustling of leaves and laden with the perfume of blossoming vines, brought no solace to her heart. Presently, unable to endure the silence longer, she started up.
“Melviny,” she called to the woman sitting beside her.
The nurse rose from the deepening gloom and stood erect in the moonlight, her figure throwing upon the whitewashed wall a distorted, specterlike silhouette.