Vanna stood by and watched her, marveling at her sister.

Then Nance spoke in a hard, tired voice.

“I said you’d take it just that way!” she remarked, opening her cigarette case and getting out another cigarette. “Mother said you’d be simply crushed, but I knew you had character! I’ve always said you had character. I’ve always known you were too good for Stan!”

Gloria winced and caught her breath in as if the words hurt her.

“Oh don’t, Nance, please!” she said pleadingly.

“Well, it’s true!” said the sister, her voice sailing up a note or two in the octave, a high, shrill, overwrought voice. “Stan was spoiled! I suppose we all helped to do it!”

She took one puff at her cigarette and flung it on the ashtray with the stumps of several others she had played with before the girls came down to her. Then she turned and began to pace up and down the room with long, masculine strides.

“My nerves are all shot to pieces!” she remarked, coming up in front of Gloria again and facing her almost defiantly.

“I had no business to come over here this way!” she went on. “I know it! But I couldn’t stand Mother groaning and carrying on any longer! And I had to see how you were taking it!”

Gloria gave her a little wistful attempt at a smile, so sad that Vanna over in the window seat put down her head on the back of a leather chair and sobbed quietly. Gloria put out a gentle hand and touched the other girl on her arm!

“I’m sorry, Nance!” she quavered, “I know—it must be— terrible—for you!”

Nance whirled on her fiercely. “Oh, and isn’t it terrible for you, then?” she demanded.

“Oh—!” Gloria drew in her breath with a suffering sound. “Oh—but in a different way!”

“How different, I’d love to know?” It was as if Nance had come with a knife to probe the wound in this girl’s breast, find the bullet, and rub the wound with salty words.

Gloria was silent for a moment, her face averted, and then she answered slowly, hesitatingly, “The girl, Nance—you—don’t have to—mind—her! You—don’t have—to think—about her at all!”

Nance stared at her averted face. “Oh, that!” she said contemptuously. “That’s nothing! You don’t mean to say you’re bothering about her! They all do things like that today. It doesn’t mean a thing! I thought you had more sense!”

“Yes, it does mean—a great deal!” said Gloria slowly, her hard, sad, young eyes looking far away through the window down the slope of the hill. “It sort of wipes out—a lot—that was—dear!” Her words came slower, her eyelids drooped, her lips drooped at their corners and were trembling as she spoke. “It makes it—he doesn’t seem—to belong to me—anymore!”

Gloria suddenly dropped into a chair and dropped her gaze to the floor, but there came no tears. The tears were all slowing down into her heart. They seemed to drown her inside, but she lifted her eyes and met the cold gaze of Nance, saw the curl of her lip.

“I didn’t think you had a jealous nature!” The words cut like knives.

Gloria shook her head. “It’s not jealousy!” she said. “It’s something wider, more final than jealousy. Jealousy you feel for a day and get over. This is something that puts me out into another sphere somehow, just makes me feel he never has belonged to me—None of it—has ever—been—real!”

Nance looked into those hopeless, lovely eyes and tried to break their look with her own glance. But Gloria’s eyes did not change.

“How absurd!” said Nance. “Stan worshipped the very ground you walked on, Glory. He couldn’t say enough about you at home. He was simply crazy about you!”

Gloria looked at her as if she were not looking into her eyes at all, but saw something beyond her, something that outweighed what had been said.

“Yes?” she answered in that strange voice that sounded like a negative. Nance drew her brows together and studied her.

“Oh, Gloria, don’t be difficult—now—when all this is happening! Don’t be trivial! I know it’s hard on you, but don’t get notions. Everybody in our set knows how devoted Stan was to you!”

“Yes?” said Gloria again and still looked at that vision of a strange girl in the distance just beyond Nance’s head. A girl that was not of her kind. A girl who was no respecter of other people’s rights. A girl lying dead beside her bridegroom.

“Gloria, you’re not going to make more trouble, are you?” Nance spoke sharply, with a kind of hard agony in her voice.

“Make trouble?” said Gloria in a soft, amazed voice. “I make trouble? There is no trouble left to make, is there Nance? No, of course I’m not going to make trouble.