Page:Old New York 2 The Old Maid.djvu/47

 She broke off, her thin lips pressed together upon her secret.

There was a silence. Blindly Delia stared at the bold shepherd.

“Come back from where?” she asked at length in a low tone.

“Oh, what does it matter? You wouldn’t understand,” Charlotte broke off, in the very words her married cousin had compassionately addressed to her virginity.

A slow blush rose to Delia’s cheek: she felt oddly humiliated by the rebuke conveyed in that contemptuous retort. She seemed to herself shy, ineffectual, as incapable as an ignorant girl of dealing with the abominations that Charlotte was thrusting on her. But suddenly some fierce feminine intuition struggled and woke in her. She forced her eyes upon her cousin’s. Rh