“No, no,” the woman cried, suddenly bursting into tears, “I have no friends, no friends in the wide world.”
A gentle hand was laid on her shoulder; a gentle voice whispered some soft words in her ear, and the woman looked up into Gabrielle’s dark eyes, and murmured something between her sobs. Then they were all silent for a few moments.
“I think you are a widow,” Miss Vaux asked gently, when she had become calmer.
“Yes,” she answered slowly, as though the word had been dragged from her, so much it seemed to pain her to speak it.
“And have you any children?”
A moment’s pause, and then another “yes,” hardly intelligible from the choking sob which accompanied it.
Miss Vaux was silent, looking inquiringly into the woman’s face. It was partly turned from her, partly shaded with her thin hand; her large eyes looking up with a strange agonized look into Gabrielle’s eyes, her pale lips moving convulsively. Gabrielle’s face was almost as pale as hers; her look almost as full of agony.
Miss Vaux glanced from one to the other, at first with pity; then suddenly a quick change came over her face, a deep flush mounted to her brow, she darted from her seat, and—calm as she ordinarily was—her whole figure trembled as she stood before them, with her fierce gaze turned on them.
Pale as death, neither of them speaking, they bore her passionate look; quite motionless, too, except that Gabrielle had instinctively clasped the widow’s hand in hers, and held it tightly.
“Speak to me, Gabrielle!” Miss Vaux cried; and her voice, harsh, loud, and quivering with passion, echoed through the room—“tell me who this woman is?”