Would this last?
did Sybil herself know the depth of her own wound? But what
could Mrs. Lee do now?
Perhaps Sybil did deceive herself a little. When this excitement
had passed away, perhaps Carrington's image might recur to her
mind a little too often for her own comfort. The future must take
care of itself. Mrs. Lee drew her sister closer to her, and said:
"Sybil, I have made a horrible mistake, and you must forgive me."
Chapter XIII
NOT until afternoon did Mrs. Lee reappear. How much she had
slept she did not say, and she hardly looked like one whose
slumbers had been long or sweet; but if she had slept little, she had
made up for the loss by thinking much, and, while she thought, the
storm which had raged so fiercely in her breast, more and more
subsided into calm. If there was not sunshine yet, there was at least
stillness. As she lay, hour after hour, waiting for the sleep that did
not come, she had at first the keen mortification of reflecting how
easily she had been led by mere vanity into imagining that she
could be of use in the world. She even smiled in her solitude at the
picture she drew of herself, reforming Ratcliffe, and Krebs, and
Schuyler Clinton. The ease with which Ratcliffe alone had twisted
her about his finger, now that she saw it, made her writhe, and the
thought of what he might have done, had she married him, and of
the endless succession of moral somersaults she would have had to
turn, chilled her with mortal terror.
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