The door was opened by Viola, in her blue gingham dress and her apron. At the sight of her visitor she looked startled almost into speechlessness. Letitia announced the fact that she had come on business, and an invitation to enter brought her sweeping into the little hall and the drawing-room beyond.
Here the two girls looked at each other for one of those swift exploring moments in which women seem to take in every detail of dress, every peculiarity of feature and revealing change of expression, that a rival has to show. Letitia, with all her apparent heaviness, had keen perceptions. With a sinking at her heart she saw the beauty of the gray eyes fastened shyly upon her, and realized what must be the power of the delicate charm, so far removed in its soft, dependent femininity from her own. She saw that this girl had a distinguishing refinement she could never boast, and that it was strong enough to triumph over such poverty-stricken surroundings as, in all her experience, she had never before encountered. Her quick eye took in the gaunt emptiness of the room as John Gault's could not have done in a week's arduous examination. She saw the split and ragged shades in the windows, the ribs of twine in the old carpet, the rents in the colonel's chair.
Viola, for her part, saw one of the handsomest
