“Listen just a minute more,” Sibyl urged, confidingly.  She was on easy ground now, to her own mind, and had no doubt of her success.  “You naturally don’t want to begin by taking part in a family quarrel, but if you take part in it, it won’t be one.  You don’t know yourself what weight you carry over there, and no one would have the right to say you did it except out of the purest kindness.  Don’t you see that Jim and his father would admire you all the more for it?  Miss Vertrees, listen!  Don’t you see we ought to do it, you and I?  Do you suppose Robert Lamhorn cares a snap of his finger for her?  Do you suppose a man like him would look at Edith Sheridan if it wasn’t for the money?” And again Sibyl’s emotion rose to the surface.  “I tell you he’s after nothing on earth but to get his finger in that old man’s money-pile, over there, next door!  He’d marry anybody to do it.  Marry Edith?” she cried.  “I tell you he’d marry their nigger cook for that!”

She stopped, afraid—­at the wrong time—­that she had been too vehement, but a glance at Mary reassured her, and Sibyl decided that she had produced the effect she wished.  Mary was not looking at her; she was staring straight before her at the wall, her eyes wide and shining.  She became visibly a little paler as Sibyl looked at her.

“After nothing on earth but to get his finger in that old man’s money-pile, over there, next door!” The voice was vulgar, the words were vulgar—­and the plain truth was vulgar!  How it rang in Mary Vertrees’s ears!  The clear mirror had caught its own image clearly in the flawed one at last.

Sibyl put forth her best bid to clench the matter.  She offered her bargain.  “Now don’t you worry,” she said, sunnily, “about this setting Edith against you.  She’ll get over it after a while, anyway, but if she tried to be spiteful and make it uncomfortable for you when you drop in over there, or managed so as to sort of leave you out, why, I’ve got a house, and Jim likes to come there.  I don’t think Edith would be that way; she’s too crazy to have you take her around with the smart crowd, but if she did, you needn’t worry.  And another thing—­I guess you won’t mind Jim’s own sister-in-law speaking of it.  Of course, I don’t know just how matters stand between you and Jim, but Jim and Roscoe are about as much alike as two brothers can be, and Roscoe was very slow making up his mind; sometimes I used to think he actually never would.  Now, what I mean is, sisters-in-law can do lots of things to help matters on like that.  There’s lots of little things can be said, and lots—­”

She stopped, puzzled.  Mary Vertrees had gone from pale to scarlet, and now, still scarlet indeed, she rose, without a word of explanation, or any other kind of word, and walked slowly to the open door and out of the room.