“You do not understand what you are saying!” cried Vera, impatiently.  “How can I give you what is not mine to give?  I have no right to dispose of this parcel”—­she held it in her hand—­“and I have given my word that I will give it to your husband alone.  How could I be so false as to do anything else with it?  You are asking impossibilities, Mrs. Kynaston.”

“You will not give it to me?” There was a sudden change in Helen’s voice—­she pleaded no longer.

“No, certainly not.”

“And that is your last word?”

“Yes.”

There was a silence.  Helen looked away over the water towards the fir-trees.  She was pale, but very quiet; all her angry agitation seemed to have died away.  Vera stood a little beneath her on the lowest step, close down to the water; she held the little parcel that was the object of the dispute in her hands, and was looking at it with an expression of deep annoyance; she was wishing heartily that she had never seen either it or the wretched little Frenchman who had insisted upon confiding it to her care.

Neither of them spoke; for an instant neither of them even moved.  There was a striking contrast between them:  Helen, slight and fragile in her bird-of-paradise garments, with jewels about her neck, and golden chains at her wrist; her pretty piquant face, almost childish in the contour of the small, delicate features.  Vera, in her plain, tight-fitting dress, whose only beauty lay in the perfect simplicity with which it followed the lines of her glorious figure; her pure, lovely face, laden with its burden of deep sadness, a little turned away from the other woman who had taken everything from her, and left her life so desolate.  And there was the silent pool at their feet, and the darkening belt of fir-trees beyond, and the pale moon ever brightening in the shadowy heavens.  It was a picture such as a painter might have dreamt of.

Not a sound—­only once the faint cry of some wild animal in the far-off woods, and the flutter of a night-moth on the wing.  Helen’s face was turned eastwards towards the fast-fading evening glow.

What is it that sends the curse of Cain into the human heart?

Did some foul and evil thing, wandering homeless around that fatal spot, enter then and there, unbidden, into her sin-stained soul?  Or had the hellish spirit been always there within her, only biding its time to burst forth in all its naked and hideous horror?

God only knows.

“Vera, gather me a water-lily!  See how lovely they are.  I am going back to dance; I want a water-lily.”

Vera looked up startled.  The sudden change of manner and the familiar mention of her name struck her as strange.  Helen was leaning towards her, all flushed and eager, pointing with her glistening, jewelled fingers over the water.

“Don’t you see how white they are, and how they gleam in the moonlight like silver?  Would not one of them look lovely in my hair?”