“You can’t be young again.”

“Perhaps not, in years; but I’ll have all that belongs to youth.”

“Not all.  No man will love you.”

Miss Webster brought her false teeth together with a snap.  “Why not, I should like to know?  What difference do a few years make?  Seventy is not much, in any other calculation.  Fancy if you had only seventy dollars between you and starvation!  Think of how many thousands of years old the world is!  I have now all that makes a woman attractive—­wealth, beautiful surroundings, scientific care.  The steam is taking out my wrinkles; I can see it.”

She turned suddenly from the glass and flashed a look of resentment on her companion.

“But I wish I had your thirty years’ advantage.  I do!  I do!  Then they’d see.”

The two women regarded each other in silence for a long moment.  Love had gone from the eyes and the hearts of both.  Hate, unacknowledged as yet, was growing.  Miss Webster bitterly envied the wide gulf between old age and her quarter-century companion and friend.  Abigail bitterly envied the older woman’s power to invoke the resemblance and appurtenances of youth, to indulge her lifelong yearnings.

When the companion went to her pillow that night she wept passionately.  “I will go,” she said.  “I’ll be a servant; but I’ll stay here no longer.”

The next morning she stood on the veranda and watched Miss Webster drive away to market.  The carriage and horses were unsurpassed in California.  The coachman and footman were in livery.  The heiress was attired in lustreless black silk elaborately trimmed with jet.  A large hat covered with plumes was kept in place above her painted face and red wig by a heavily dotted veil—­that crier of departed charms.  She held a black lace parasol in one carefully gloved hand.  Her pretty foot was encased in patent leather.

“The old fool!” murmured Abby.  “Why, oh, why could it not have been mine?  I could make myself young without being ridiculous.”

She let her duties go and sauntered down to the lake.  Many painted boats were anchored close to ornamental boat-houses.  They seemed strangely out of place beneath the sad old willows.  The lawns were green with the green of spring.  Roses ran riot everywhere.  The windows of the handsome old-fashioned houses were open, and Abby was afforded glimpses of fluttering white gowns, heard the tinkle of the mandolin, the cold precise strains of the piano, the sudden uplifting of a youthful soprano.

“After all, it only makes a little difference to them that they got nothing,” thought the companion, with a sigh.

A young man stepped from one of the long windows of the Holt mansion and came down the lawn.  Miss Williams recognized Strowbridge.  She had not seen him for several weeks; but he had had his part in her bitter moments, and her heart beat at sight of him to-day.

“I too am a fool,” she thought.  “Even with her money my case would be hopeless.  I am nearly double his age.”