Dinah said, "Will you let me come in, Hetty?" and Hetty,
without speaking, for she was confused and vexed, opened the door wider
and let her in.
What a strange contrast the two figures made, visible enough in that
mingled twilight and moonlight! Hetty, her cheeks flushed and her eyes
glistening from her imaginary drama, her beautiful neck and arms bare,
her hair hanging in a curly tangle down her back, and the baubles in her
ears. Dinah, covered with her long white dress, her pale face full of
subdued emotion, almost like a lovely corpse into which the soul has
returned charged with sublimer secrets and a sublimer love. They were
nearly of the same height; Dinah evidently a little the taller as she
put her arm round Hetty's waist and kissed her forehead.
"I knew you were not in bed, my dear," she said, in her sweet clear
voice, which was irritating to Hetty, mingling with her own peevish
vexation like music with jangling chains, "for I heard you moving; and I
longed to speak to you again to-night, for it is the last but one that
I shall be here, and we don't know what may happen to-morrow to keep us
apart. Shall I sit down with you while you do up your hair?"
"Oh yes," said Hetty, hastily turning round and reaching the second
chair in the room, glad that Dinah looked as if she did not notice her
ear-rings.
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