Frances had gone into the house the instant Mabel began to speak. "I'm
cold," she had said; "I think I'll get a shawl." Mabel and I were alone.
I believe it was the first time we had been really alone since I
arrived. She looked up from the teacups, fixing her pallid eyes on mine.
She had made a question of the sentence.
"You hear it like that?" I asked innocently. I purposely used the
present tense.
She changed her stare from one eye to the other; it was absolutely
expressionless. My sister's step sounded on the floor of the room behind
us.
"If only--" Mabel began, then stopped, and my own feelings leaping out
instinctively completed the sentence I felt was in her mind:
"--something would happen."
She instantly corrected me. I had caught her thought, yet somehow
phrased it wrongly.
"We could escape!" She lowered her tone a little, saying it hurriedly.
The "we" amazed and horrified me; but something in her voice and manner
struck me utterly dumb. There was ice and terror in it. It was a dying
woman speaking--a lost and hopeless soul.
In that atrocious moment I hardly noticed what was said exactly, but I
remember that my sister returned with a grey shawl about her shoulders,
and that Mabel said, in her ordinary voice again, "It is chilly, yes;
let's have tea inside," and that two maids, one of them the grenadier,
speedily carried the loaded trays into the morning-room and put a match
to the logs in the great open fireplace.
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