for several days," she answered, "and
this morning a few lines were copied in the Dinwiddie _Bee_. Oliver is
so famous it was impossible to keep things hushed up, I suppose. But you
knew all this, Jinny darling."

"Oh, yes, I knew that," answered Virginia; then, rising suddenly from
her chair, she said almost irritably: "Susan, I want to be alone. I
can't think until I am alone." By her look Susan knew that until that
minute some blind hope had kept alive in her, some childish pretence
that it might all be a dream, some passionate evasion of the ultimate
outcome.

"But you'll let me come back? You'll let me spend the night with you,
Jinny?"

"If you want to, you may come. But I don't need you. I don't need
anybody. I don't need anybody," she repeated bitterly; and this
bitterness appeared to change not only her expression, but her features
and her carriage and that essential attribute of her being which had
been the real Virginia.

Awed in spite of herself, Susan put on her hat again, and bent over to
kiss her. "I'll be back before bed-time, Jinny. Don't shut me away,
dear. Let me share your pain with you."

At this something that was like a smile trembled for an instant on
Virginia's face.

"You are good, Susan," she responded, but there was no tenderness, no
gratitude even, in her voice. She had grown hard with the implacable
hardness of grief.

When the door had closed behind her friend, she stood looking through
the window until she saw her pass slowly, as though she were reluctant
to go, down Sycamore Street in the direction of her home. "I am glad she
has gone," she thought coldly. "Susan is good, but I am glad she has
gone." Then, turning back to the fire, she took up the piece of
embroidery and mechanically folded it before she laid it away. While her
hands were still on the bag in which she kept it, a shiver went through
her body, and a look of resolution passed over her features, making them
appear as if they were sculptured in marble.

"He will be sorry some day," she thought. "He will be sorry when it is
too late, and if I were there now--if I were to see him, it might all be
prevented. It might all be prevented and we might be happy again." In
her distorted mind, which worked with the quickness and the intensity of
delirium, this idea assumed presently the prominence and the force of an
hallucination. So powerful did it become that it triumphed over all the
qualities which had once constituted h