After Stolliker had gone, the excitement which had seemed to brace Carlita for the emergency suddenly wore itself out, and for several days she was confined to her room, with a nearer approach to fever than she had ever had in her strong, healthy young life before.
It was during those few days that a strange change came over Jessica.
She developed a sudden affection for her mother's ward that touched that poor, friendless young thing to the heart. She even refused to go to the opera the night that Carlita was threatened with delirium, and sat beside the bed, holding Carlita's hand while the physician was in the room, and bending over the patient once or twice with tenderest solicitude when there was a murmur of a name upon those rambling lips which she did not wish the doctor to hear.
And Jessica learned much in those few days, much that it would have been a thousand times better if she had never known; but Carlita was unaware of that.
She lifted the girl's hand to her cooling lips, and pressed it there passionately when she realized who it was that had nursed her so carefully.
"How shall I thank you?" she murmured, faintly. "I don't think I have ever appreciated before how good you are!"
"Perhaps we have never quite understood each other before," returned Jessica, in that low, melodious voice which none knew better than she how to assume.
"Ah, yes, it is that," answered Carlita, eagerly. "But now that I know how tender your friendship can be, you will not withdraw it from me? I am so alone, so pitifully alone in all the world! There is not one creature that belongs to me, not one that cares whether I live or die, not one to whom I could stretch out my hand for help, no matter what my needs may be. It seems to me sometimes that my heart will break from the heaviness of its loneliness and isolation. Let me love you, Jessica! Let me love you!"
There was a peculiar smile upon the Judas lips, a smile filled with fascination—a fascination which she was exerting upon that helpless girl as she had upon so many men, luring them to eternal ruin, and then she bent and pressed a Judas kiss upon Carlita's tremulous lips.