CHAPTER XXIII.
LADY VALERIA FIGHTS HER OWN BATTLE.
The two women stood face to face in silence for a few moments. Surprise made Hilda dumb. She gazed in unconcealed wonderment at the small pale face framed in white crape, the delicate high-bred features, refined almost to attenuation, the luminous violet eyes with their long dark lashes, eyes which alone gave life and colour to the face.
Lady Valeria looked at the girl with so piercing a scrutiny that those brilliant eyes of hers seemed to burn into the face of her rival—a scathing look, measuring and appraising that modest girlish beauty, cheapening those innocent charms in scornful wonder.
And this was the woman for whose sake she, Valeria, had been flung away like an old glove—this girl-face, with its candid blue eyes and babified bloom, its broad white forehead ringed round with infantile curls of golden brown, its delicately pencilled eyebrows, its coral lips, and small white teeth.
"For people who admire babies the girl is well enough," thought Lady Valeria.
Yet even her small knowledge of physiognomy taught her that the broad full forehead and the firmly-moulded lips meant force of character and firmness of purpose—that this girlish beauty was the beauty of a good and brave woman—that here there was no reed for her to twist and rend at her own passionate will, but a nature that was firmer and more concentrated than her own. Equal forces had met in these two—the force of passion and the force of principle.
"So you are Miss Heathcote," said the pale lips at last, after that silent interval, in which Hilda had heard the beating of her own heart; "you are the Miss Heathcote who is to marry Bothwell Grahame?"
"Yes, Lady Valeria. Bothwell has told me how kind a friend he had in General Harborough," returned Hilda calmly, trying to feel at her ease under that searching gaze. "I am very much flattened that you should come to see me."
"I fear you will feel less flattered when you know the motive of my visit. No, thanks; I prefer to stand," she said curtly, as Hilda wheeled a chair towards her guest, and courteously invited her to be seated. "You will hate me, no doubt, when you know why I am here; and yet I am come to do you a service—perhaps the greatest service which one woman can render to another."
"What service, Lady Valeria?" asked Hilda, whose girlish bloom had been momently fading, and who was now almost as pale as her visitor.
