r apartment door. It was really not so late
as the children's having gone to bed made it seem; but at nine o'clock
it was too late for any probable visitor except Fulkerson. It might
be he, and March was glad to postpone the impending question to his
curiosity concerning the immediate business Fulkerson might have with
him. He went himself to the door, and confronted there a lady deeply
veiled in black and attended by a very decorous serving-woman.
"Are you alone, Mr. March--you and Mrs. March?" asked the lady, behind
her veil; and, as he hesitated, she said: "You don't know me! Miss
Vance"; and she threw back her veil, showing her face wan and agitated
in the dark folds. "I am very anxious to see you--to speak with you
both. May I come in?"
"Why, certainly, Miss Vance," he answered, still too much stupefied by
her presence to realize it.
She promptly entered, and saying, with a glance at the hall chair by the
door, "My maid can sit here?" followed him to the room where he had left
his wife.
Mrs. March showed herself more capable of coping with the fact. She
welcomed Miss Vance with the liking they both felt for the girl, and
with the sympathy which her troubled face inspired.
"I won't tire you with excuses for coming, Mrs. March," she said,
"for it was the only thing left for me to do; and I come at my aunt's
suggestion." She added this as if it would help to account for her more
on the conventional plane, and she had the instinctive good taste to
address herself throughout to Mrs. March as much as possible, though
what she had to say was mainly for March. "I don't know how to begin--I
don't know how to speak of this terrible affair. But you know what I
mean. I feel as if I had lived a whole lifetime since it happened. I
don't want you to pity me for it," she said, forestalling a politeness
from Mrs. March. "I'm the last one to be thought of, and you mustn't
mind me if I try to make you. I came to find out all of the truth that
I can, and when I know just what that is I shall know what to do. I have
read the inquest; it's all burned into my brain. But I don't care for
that--for myself: you must let me say such things without minding me. I
know that your husband--that Mr. March was there; I read his testimony;
and I wished to ask him--to ask him--" She stopped and looked
distractedly about. "But what folly! He must have said everything he
knew--he had to." Her eyes wandered to him from his wife, on whom she
h
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