A few moments of embarrassed silence followed.  Mrs. Bray crossed the room, touching with her foot the bank-bills, as if they were of no account to her.

“I am half beside myself,” said Mrs. Dinneford.

Mrs. Bray made no response, did not even turn toward her visitor.

“I spoke hastily.”

“A vampire!” Mrs. Bray swept round upon her fiercely.  “A blood-sucker!” and she ground her teeth in well-feigned passion.

Mrs. Dinneford sat down trembling.

“Take your money and go,” said Mrs. Bray, and she lifted the bills from the floor and tossed them into her visitor’s lap.  “I am served right.  It was evil work, and good never comes of evil.”

But Mrs. Dinneford did not stir.  To go away at enmity with this woman was, so far as she could see, to meet exposure and unutterable disgrace.  Anything but that.

“I shall leave this money, trusting still to your good offices,” she said, at length, rising.  Her manner was much subdued.  “I spoke hastily, in a sort of blind desperation.  We should not weigh too carefully the words that are extorted by pain or fear.  In less than an hour I will send you a hundred dollars more.”

Mrs. Dinneford laid the bank-bills on a table, and then moved to the door, but she dared not leave in this uncertainty.  Looking back, she said, with an appealing humility of voice and manner foreign to her character,

“Let us be friends still, Mrs. Bray; we shall gain nothing by being enemies.  I can serve you, and you can serve me.  My suspicions were ill founded.  I felt wild and desperate, and hardly knew what I was saying.”

She stood anxiously regarding the little dark-eyed woman, who did not respond by word or movement.

Taking her hand from the door she was about opening, Mrs. Dinneford came back into the room, and stood close to Mrs. Bray: 

“Shall I send you the money?”

“You can do as you please,” was replied, with chilling indifference.

“Are you implacable?”

“I am not used to suspicion, much less denunciation and assault.  A vampire!  Do you know what that means?”

“It meant, as used by me, only madness.  I did not know what I was saying.  It was a cry of pain—­nothing more.  Consider how I stand, how much I have at stake, in what a wretched affair I have become involved.  It is all new to me, and I am bewildered and at fault.  Do not desert me in this crisis.  I must have some one to stand between me and this woman; and if you step aside, to whom can I go?”

Mrs. Bray relented just a little.  Mrs. Dinneford pleaded and humiliated herself, and drifted farther into the toils of her confederate.

“You are not rich, Mrs. Bray,” she said, at parting, “independent in spirit as you are.  I shall add a hundred dollars for your own use; and if ever you stand in need, you will know where to find an unfailing friend.”

Mrs. Bray put up her hands, and replied, “No, no, no; don’t think of such a thing.  I am not mercenary.  I never serve a friend for money.”