There was no faltering in her voice, no sound of apology. She spoke like
one who had a right there, and this it was which angered me and made me
lose my self-command. Starting to my feet, I confronted her where she
sat in my chair, by Guy's bedside, with those queer blue eyes of hers
fixed so questioningly upon me as if she wondered at my impertinence.
"Miss McDonald," I said, laying great stress on the name, "why are you
here, and how did you dare come?"
"I was almost afraid, it was so dark when I left the train, and it kept
thundering so," she replied, mistaking my meaning altogether, "but there
was no conveyance at the station, and so I came on alone. I never knew
Guy was sick. Is he very bad?"
Her perfect composure and utter ignoring of the past provoked me beyond
endurance, and without stopping to think what I was doing, I seized her
arm, and drawing her into an adjoining room, said, in a suppressed
whisper of rage: "Very bad--I should think so. We have feared and still fear he will die,
and it's all your work, the result of your wickedness, and yet you
presume to come here into his very room--you who are no wife of his, and
no woman, either, to do what you have done."
What more I said I do not remember. I only know Daisy put her hands to
her head in a scared, helpless way, and said: "I do not quite understand it all, or what you wish me to do."
"Do?" I replied. "I want you to leave this house to-night--now, before
Guy can possibly be harmed by your presence. Go back to the depot and
take the next train home. It is due in an hour. You have time to reach
it."
"But it's so dark, and it rains and thunders so," she said, with a
shudder, as a heavy peal shook the house and the rain beat against the
windows.
I think I must have been crazy with mad excitement, and her answer made
me worse.
"You were not afraid to come here," I said. "You can go from here as
well. Thunder will not hurt such as you."
Even then she did not move, but crouched in a corner of the room
farthest from me, reminding me of my kitten when I try to drive it from
a place where it has been permitted to play. As that will not understand
my scats and gestures, so she did not seem to comprehend my meaning.
But I made her at last, and with a very white face and a strange look in
her great, staring blue eyes, she said: "Fanny" (she always called me Miss Frances before), "Fanny, do you
really mean me to go back in the dark and the rain and the thunder? Then
I will, but I must tell you first what I came for, and you will tell
Guy. He gave me ten thousand dollars when we first were married; settled
it on me, they called it, and father was one of the trustees and kept
the paper for me till I was of age. So much I understand, but not why I
can't give it back to Guy, for father says I can't. I never dreamed it
was mine after the--the--the divorce."