“My husband told you!” Fanchon sprang out of bed and ran across the room, seizing Virginia’s arm and looking at her wildly. “William told you!” Virginia, who was fatally honest sometimes, said nothing; but her face confessed that William had told her much. She was horrified. How could she make this furious little creature understand how William had told her, and how she had replied? She ought never to have come here. For an instant panic seized her and she longed to get away; and then her inherited and noble fearlessness steadied her. She met Fanchon’s feverish look calmly and frankly. “I wish you’d believe me,” she said simply. “I’m not that sort of a woman, Fanchon. It’s true that William and I were engaged once, but he broke it off when he married you. And now”--Virginia’s pride flashed in her eyes--“if he were free to-morrow, Fanchon, it would make no difference--no difference in the world to me.” They looked at each other. Fanchon, still holding the other girl’s arm in her shaking hands, searched Virginia’s face with that wild look of hers, her lips quivering. Virginia met the look at first proudly and angrily, and then with such compassion, such tenderness and honesty, that Fanchon’s lips twisted convulsively again. Suddenly she dropped Virginia’s arm and turned away. She took an unsteady step and almost reeled as she flung herself into a chair, hiding her face in her hands. “Do you believe me now, Fanchon?” Virginia asked, more gently. There was no answer for a moment, then she heard the other girl’s convulsive weeping. Fanchon, who had never controlled an impulse in her life, was weeping wildly, twisting about in her chair and beating the air for breath. It startled Virginia; she forgot herself and went to her. Seizing the frantic little hands, she held them in her cool, firm ones, as a mother might hold a frantic child’s. “Hush!” she whispered. “You’re ill, you mustn’t! Don’t cry like this.” But Fanchon wept on until she lay there almost fainting, white and limp and broken. Virginia began to suspect what had happened before she came into the room. “_Dieu_, they all hated me!” Fanchon gasped at last. “All but Leigh and that silly child, Emily.” She laughed wildly, still gasping. “She tried to paint her face like mine, and they made her wash it off. _Quelle drôle de chose que la vie!_ And they hated me for that.” She gasped again, dragging her hands away from Virginia and beating the air with them. “They made him hate me, too.” “Oh, no, no!” cried Virginia. “Fanchon, you’re wild--you don’t understand!” “Oh, I understand!” she retorted bitterly. “You’re one of them. I don’t know why you came here--you’re one of them!” “I came because you’re ill. You’ll be very ill if you don’t stop.” “You think I’ll die, _n’est-ce-pas_?” Her red mouth twisted oddly. “They’d like me to die, so he’d be free. They’re so good--they don’t like divorces!”