Mrs. Farrell rose and made some tragic paces across the schoolroom floor to where the girl sat, and fell on her knees before her, having with a great show of neatness arranged a bit of paper to kneel upon. She took Rachel’s hands in her own, and with uplifted face implored, “Advise me, my friend,” which rendered the girl helpless with laughter.
“Oh, for shame, for shame, Mrs. Farrell!” she said, when she could get breath; “you make fun of everything.”
“No, no, Rachel, I don’t! I never made fun of Mr. Easton. Would you like to know how he behaved when he made love to me? No? Well, you shall. Now, you are the fatally beautiful Mrs. Farrell, and you’re sitting on a rock in the hollow near the sugar house. Your head is slightly downcast, so—yes, very good—and you are twiddling the handle of your sun umbrella and poking the point of it into the dirt. Mr. Easton is standing before you with his arms folded thus—ahem!—waiting life or death at your hands.” She folded her arms, and gave that intensely feminine interpretation of a man’s port and style which is always so delicious. “‘Oh, Mr. Easton,’ you are faltering, ‘I am afraid that you have deceived yourself in me; I am indeed. I am not at all the party you think you love. I was—listen!—I was changed at nurse. She whom you love, the real Mrs. Farrell, is my twin sister, and the world knows her as—Rachel Woodward!’”
Rachel had been struggling to release herself from a position so scandalous; but Mrs. Farrell, who had never risen from her knees, had securely hemmed her in. At the climax of the burlesque the girl flung herself back and gave way to a rush of sobs and tears. Mrs. Farrell attempted to throw her arms about her and console her, but Rachel shrank resolutely aside. “Don’t touch me!” she cried, when she could speak. “It’s horrible! You have no pity; you have no heart! You have no peace of yourself, and you are never at rest unless you are tormenting some one else. I wish you would go away from our house and never come back again!”
Mrs. Farrell rose from her knees, all her jesting washed away, for that moment, at least, by this torrent of feeling from a source habitually locked under an icy discipline.
“Rachel,” she said, “do you really hate me?”
“No,” said the girl, fiercely. “If I hated you I could bear it! Nothing is sacred to you. You only care for yourself and your own pleasure, and you don’t care how you make others suffer, so you please yourself.”
“Yes, I do, Rachel,” said Mrs. Farrell, humbly. “I know I’m selfish. But I do care for you, and I’m very, very sorry that I’ve wounded you. You needn’t forgive me; I don’t deserve it, but I’m sorry all the same.”
The afternoon was waning when they came into the schoolhouse, and now a level ray of the setting sun struck across Rachel’s head, fallen on the desk before her, and illumined Mrs. Farrell’s stricken beauty. They sat there till after the sunset had faded away. Then Mrs. Farrell went softly about the room, taking down the sketches, which she brought and laid before Rachel. The girl lifted her head and took out the three sketches in which Mrs. Farrell figured, and, tearing them in pieces, thrust them into the stove which stood, red with rust, in the middle of the room. She would not let Mrs. Farrell help her out of the window, and that lady followed her meekly homeward when they left the schoolhouse.
Before she slept she came and knocked at Mrs. Farrell’s door, and entered in response to her cheerful “Come in, come in!”