But it was a long step--and there was a streak of rustic decorum in Mrs.Barker's nature--the instinct that made Kitty Carter keep a perfectly secluded and distinct sitting-room in the days when she served her father's guests--that now had impelled her to make it a proviso that the first step of her journey should be from her old home in her father's hotel.
It was this instinct of the proprieties that had revived in her suddenly at the door of the old sitting-room.
Then a new phase of the situation flashed upon her.

It was hard for her vanity to accept Van Loo's desertion as voluntary and final.

What if that hateful woman had lured him away by some trick or artfully designed message?
She was capable of such meanness to insure the fulfillment of her prophecy.

Or, more dreadful thought, what if she had some hold on his affections--she had said that he had pursued her; or, more infamous still, there were some secret understanding between them, and that she--Mrs.Barker--was the dupe of them both! What was she doing in the hotel at such a moment?
What was her story of going to Hymettus but a lie as transparent as her own?
The tortures of jealousy, which is as often the incentive as it is the result of passion, began to rack her.
She had probably yet known no real passion for this man; but with the thought of his abandoning her, and the conception of his faithlessness, came the wish to hold and keep him that was dangerously near it.

What if he were even then in that room, the room where she had said she would not stay to be insulted, and they, thus secured against her intrusion, were laughing at her now?
She half rose at the thought, but a sound of a horse's hoofs in the stable-yard arrested her.