She pondered, but her face was kindly and her voice very gentle as she said: "I don't want to seem unkind now in your hour of grief, but I can't wear the ring." His eyes filled with tears, and she added: "I'll keep it for you. The real question between us will have to be decided some time in the future--when we know each other better. You need not think of paying me. Go and see your relation. It may be a rich aunt come to adopt you."
"Couldn't you _learn_ to love me?" he asked, poignantly.
"I might." She smiled. "I like you already." And she went away, leaving him with stronger will to dare and do.
As Victor entered the library he was met by a very pale, wide-eyed young woman in a picturesque black hat. Her voice was deep and full of dramatic fervor as she said:
Her eyes, large and very dark, almost black, gazed at him appealingly, as she said: "Pardon me for a little deception. I am your relation only in a spiritual sense--I share your sorrow, and in other ways I am related to you. I was eager to see you, and I did not send in my name for the reason that it would have repelled you, and you might have refused to meet me."
Victor thought her a very singular and very theatric young person. Certainly she was under some strong stress of emotion which caused her lips to quiver and her voice to vibrate tensely. He knew her now. She was the girl he had confronted in the court-room, and he stared at her, uncertain of his footing. She seemed like some of the figures he had seen on the stage, vivid, swift of change, unreal, but her voice was vibrantly charming. He was sure she was the girl he had met on the street, and she had stood beside the man Aiken during their brief appearance in the court-room.
She approached a step or two, as if throwing herself on his mercy. "My name is Florence Aiken. I am a newspaper writer. I am the one who brought all this trouble to you. It was I who wrote that first article in the _Star_ denouncing your mother."
He recoiled before her quite as dramatically as she could have wished. "You wrote that!" he exclaimed. "I thought a man did that job."
She could not help a slight expression of pride in her work. "It was mine, every word of it. I was terribly vindictive, I admit; but you must know I had some provocation. Let me tell you? Will you listen to me? Please do! I'm not so heartless as I seemed in that article, and I cannot rest till I have made my peace with you."