“Yes, Sybil!” the other answered curtly. And then as if something in Lady Lansdowne’s tone had wounded her, “Why not?” she continued, raising her head proudly. “My name came easily enough to your ladyship’s lips once! And I am not aware that I have done anything to deprive me of the right to call my friends by their names, be they whom they may!”
“No, no! But——”
“But you meant it, Louisa!” the other retorted with energy. “Or is it that you find me so changed, so old, so worn, so altered from her you once knew, that it astonishes you to trace in this face the features of Sybil Matching!”
“You are changed,” the other answered kindly. “I fear you have been ill?”
“I am ill. I am more, I am dying. Not here, nor to-day, nor to-morrow——”
Lady Lansdowne interrupted her. “In that sense,” she said gently, “we are all dying.” But though she said it, the change in Lady Sybil’s appearance did indeed shock her; almost as much as her presence in that place amazed her.
“I have but three months to live,” Lady Sybil answered feverishly; and her sunken cheeks and bright eyes, which told of some hidden disease, confirmed her words. “I am dying in that sense! Do you hear? But I dare say,” with a flash of her old levity, “it is my presence here that shocks you? You are thinking what Vermuyden would say if he turned the corner behind you, and found us together!” And, as Lady Lansdowne, with a nervous start, looked over her shoulder, with the old recklessness, “I’d like—I’d like to see his face, my dear, and yours, too, if he found us. But,” she continued, with an abrupt change to impassioned earnestness, “it’s not to see you that I came to-day! Don’t think it! It’s not to see you that I’ve been waiting for two hours past. I want to see my girl! I am going to see her, do you hear! You must bring her to me!”
“Sybil!”
“Don’t contradict me, Louisa,” she cried peremptorily. “Haven’t I told you that I am dying? Don’t you hear what I say! Am I to die and not see my child? Cruel woman! Heartless creature! But you always were! And cold as an icicle!”
“No, indeed, I am not! And I think you should see her,” Lady Lansdowne answered, in no little distress. How could she not be distressed by the contrast between this woman plainly and almost shabbily dressed—for the purpose perhaps of evading notice—and with illness stamped on her face, and the brilliant, harum-scarum Lady Sybil, with whom her thoughts had been busy a few minutes before? “I think you ought to see her,” she repeated in a soothing tone. “But you should take the proper steps to do so. You——”