That evening Mr. Falconer called.  Susan said she was not well, and kept her room.  Gertrude had planned to go to the opera with Tom, but she decided to remain at home.  Long after Tom had gone out Susan in her chamber above could hear from the parlor the murmur of voices—­Mr. Falconer’s and Gertrude’s.  They were low and deep:  the topic between them was evidently no light one.  While she listened her imagination was busy concerning their subject, their attitudes, their looks, and even their words.  And every imagining was such a pain that she tried to close her ear against their voices.  Then she went to her mother’s room.  Here, being forced to reply to commonplaces when all her thought was strained to the parlor, she was soon driven back to her own chamber.  She turned the gas low and lay on a lounge, her face buried in the cushion, abandoned to a wrecked feeling.

After a time she heard some one enter her room.  She sat up, and saw Gertrude standing beside her, the gas turned high.  She wished her sister would go away:  she hated the sight of that beautiful, glad face.  She turned her eyes away from it, and then, ashamed to begrudge the young thing her happiness, she lifted her stained lids, to Gertrude’s face and smiled all she possibly could.  She tried in that moment to feel glad that the disappointment and grief had come to her instead of Gertrude.  Her heart was inured to a hard lot, but Gertrude’s had always been sheltered.  It would be a pity to have it turned out into the cold:  her own had long been used to chill and to hunger.

“Susie, won’t you go with us sleigh-riding to-morrow evening?” Gertrude asked.  “Mr. Falconer and I have planned a sleighing-party for to-morrow evening.  They say the sleighing is perfectly superb.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing?” Susan asked, feeling somehow that there would be a relief in hearing that it was all.

“That’s a part of what we’ve been doing.”  A rosy glow came into Gertrude’s cheek, and the old mean, jealous feeling came back into Susan’s heart.  “Mr. Falconer wants you to go,” said Gertrude.

“He does not,” Susan returned in a fierce tone.  She was forgetting herself:  her heart was giddy and blind with the sudden wave of bitterness that came pouring over it.  “He wants you:  nobody wants me.  Go away!”

“Of course I’ll go away if you want me to,” Gertrude replied, pouting and looking injured, but yet lingering at Susan’s side.  She had come to tell something, and she didn’t wish to be defrauded of the pleasure.  “I guess you’re asleep yet, Susie.  Wake up and look at this;” and Gertrude held her beautiful white hand before Susan’s eyes, and pointed to a superb solitaire diamond that blazed like a star on her finger.  She sat down beside her sister.  “I’m engaged, Susie, and I came up here to ask your blessing, and you’re so cross to me;” and Gertrude put her head on Susan’s shoulder and shed a few tears.

Susan could have cried out with frantic pain.  “But,” she thought, “I knew it was coming.  After all, I am glad to have the suspense ended—­to be brought to face the matter squarely.”