Kitabı oku: «The Senator's Bride», sayfa 5
CHAPTER VII.
"I HATE IT—I HATE HER!"
"When first I saw my favorite child,
I thought my jealous heart would break,
But when the unconscious infant smiled,
I kissed it for its mother's sake."
—Byron.
With the rosy dawn of the summer day consciousness returned to Bruce Conway—a dazed, half-consciousness, though, that only took in part of the scene, and a memory that only held Grace Winans. He muttered of her in his distracted slumbers; he waked and asked for her with a piteous anxiety that went to Lulu's tender heart.
"Had we better send for her?" she wistfully queried of her brother.
"No, indeed, little sister; it would only complicate matters. She would not come; he does not deserve it. Poor boy! I am sorry, but we can do nothing."
"Nothing, brother?"
"To bring her here, I mean. Try to reason with him, Lulu, and talk him out of this feverish fancy."
"Grace—Gracie!" came in a whisper from the bed.
Lulu was by him in an instant.
"Will not I do as well as Grace?"
"No." His pallid brow contracted in a vexed frown. "Go away; you are not Grace."
"No, but I am Willard's sister. Cannot you like me a little for his sake, and not worry yourself so much?" she asked, gently and persuasively.
"Cannot you get Grace to come—won't you try?" he whispered, in a faint voice.
A low tinkle of the door-bell seemed to echo his words. Half raising his handsome head, he looked at her eagerly.
"That may be Grace now," he said. "Won't you go and see?"
"Yes," she answered, gently, though she sighed as she went; "I will go and see."
She started in astonishment when she opened the door. Outside was a pleasant-faced Irishwoman, dressed plainly and neatly, with a pretty babe in her arms. It was Mrs. Winans' nurse and child.
Grace had learned from Miss Story where Bruce was, and when Norah went out to take the little boy for his morning airing, she had directed her to call and inquire of Captain Clendenon how Mr. Conway was getting on.
Norah introduced herself and her business briefly and clearly, and Lulu invited her in and gave her a seat.
"And this is Mrs. Winans' baby?" she said, taking the beautiful boy from the nurse's arms and kissing his rosy face. "How lovely he is!"
Little Paul smiled fearlessly back at her, and something in the dark flash of his eyes so vividly recalled his father that she thought suddenly of Bruce Conway waiting up stairs for her.
"I will bring my brother down to tell you exactly how Mr. Conway is," she said; and turning away with the little bundle of lace, and cambric, and laughing babyhood in her arms, she went back to Bruce Conway's room.
Her brother looked surprised at the strange little visitor. She smiled and went up to the bedside, holding triumphantly up the tiny baby that, quite unabashed by the strange scene, jumped, and crowed, and smiled brilliantly at Bruce.
"Mrs. Winans did not come, but she sent her representative, Mr. Conway," she said, thinking it would please him to see the pretty child. "This is her son."
"Her son!" Bruce Conway's eyes dwelt a moment on that picture of rosy health and beauty, and a shudder shook him from head to foot. "Her child! his child! Take it away from me, Miss Clendenon. I hate it! I hate her!"
Lulu recoiled in terror at the sharp, angry tones and the jealous pain and madness that gleamed in his eyes. She turned away surprised and frightened at the mischief she had done, and was about to leave the room.
"Lulu, let me see the baby," said her brother's voice, as she reached the door.
His tones wore strangely moved, and as he came across to her she noted the faint flush that colored his high forehead. He took it in his arms and looked long and earnestly at the little face, finding amid its darker beauty many infantile beauties borrowed from the fair lineaments of its mother.
"God bless you, little baby," he said, touching reverent lips to the innocent brow, with a prayer in his heart for her whose brow was so mirrored in that of her child that he flushed, then paled, as he kissed it, thinking of hers that his lips might never press.
He loved the child for its mother's sake.
Bruce hated it for its father's sake.
It was a fair exponent of the character of the two men.
He gave it quietly back to Lulu, but she, explaining her errand sent him to tell Norah, with the child in his arms, while she went back to soothe the irritated invalid.
"I am sorry," she began, penitently, "I would not have brought the babe, but I thought, I fancied, that you would like it for its mother's sake. Forgive me."
The moody anger in his eyes cleared at sound of her magical, silver-sweet tones.
"Forgive me," he said, feebly. "I was a brute to speak to a lady so—but I was not myself. You don't understand a man's feelings in such a case, Miss Clendenon. Thank you for that forgiving smile."
He caught up the little hand gently straightening his tumbled pillows, and with feeble, pallid gallantry, touched it to his lips. A shiver of bitter-sweet emotion thrilled the young girl as she hastily drew it away.
"You must not talk any more," she said, gently, "or brother will scold, and the surgeon, too. Brother will be back in a minute, so be quiet. Don't let anything occupy your mind, and try, do, to go to sleep and rest."
She put her finger to her lip and nodded archly at him.
He smiled back, and half-closing his eyes, lay looking at her as she took a chair at the other end of the room, and busied herself with a bit of fancy work.
"How pretty she is," he thought, vaguely, and when he fell into a fitful slumber, her fair face blent with Grace's in his dreams, and bewildered him with its bright, enchanting beauty.
CHAPTER VIII.
"BUT AS FOR HER, SHE STAID AT HOME."
To aid thy mind's development, to watch
The dawn of little joys, to sit and see
Almost thy very growth, to view thee catch
Knowledge of objects, wonders yet to see!
To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee,
And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss.
—Byron's Childe Harold.
To Bruce Conway the months of slow and tardy convalescence seemed like dead weights on his impatient, restless soul; to Grace Winans, in her splendid but strangely silent home, where but few guests were received, and which she rarely left, time passed as it did to Mariana in the Moated Grange. But for all that, the summer passed like a painful dream, and the "melancholy days" had come; "time does not stop for tears."
Mrs. Conway had prevailed on Bruce to compromise his intention of going abroad again by spending the winter with her amid the gayeties of Washington—the "Paris of America."
How far a pretty face had influenced him in making this decision it is impossible to say; but Mrs. Conway, in her gratitude to the Clendenons for their kindness to her idol, had fairly worried them into consenting to let Lulu pass the winter with her in the gay capital city. For Lulu it may be said that no persuasion was needed to obtain her consent, and how far her fancy for a handsome face had influenced her, we will not undertake to say either. However this may be, the Washington newspapers duly chronicled for the benefit of fashionable society the interesting intelligence that the elegant Mr. Bruce Conway, the hero of the much talked of Norfolk duel, and his still brilliant aunt, Mrs. Conway—both so well known in Washington circles—had taken a handsome suite of rooms at Willard's Hotel for the winter. And the newspapers—which will flatter any woman in society, be she fair or homely—added the information that Mrs. Conway had one of the belles of Norfolk for her guest—the lovely Miss C.—concluding with the stereotyped compliment that her marvelous beauty and varied accomplishments would create a stir in fashionable society; and thus was Lulu Clendenon launched on the sea of social dissipation.
A deep flush of shame and annoyance tinged the girl's dimpled cheeks, as leaning back in a great sleepy hollow of a chair in their private parlor, skimming lightly over the "society news," she came upon this paragraph about a week after their arrival.
Bruce Conway, lounging idly in an opposite chair, marked that sudden rose-flush under his half-closed lids, and wondered thereat.
On her pallid cheek and forehead came a color and a light.
"As I have seen the rosy red flushing in the Northern night," he spouted, in his old non-commital fashion of quoting Tennyson to pretty girls.
She glanced across at him, her color brightening, "all the spirit deeply dawning in the dusk of hazel eyes," but she uttered no word.
"Well, Brownie, what is it?" he queried, giving her the name he often called her for her nut-brown hair and eyes.
"This."
She folded down the paragraph and tossed it across to him, with a willful pout of her red lips, and watched with solicitude for the sympathetic indignation she expected to read in his eyes.
He finished it, and laughed.
"Umph! Some people wake up and find themselves famous. Well, what is the matter with that? Is not the notice sufficiently flattering?"
"It is not that!" She sprang up and began walking excitedly up and down the floor. "I do not like it—I—it is a shame to drag a young girl's name before the public that way. It puts a modest girl to the blush. A 'stir in society,' indeed!" her lip curling, a comical anger in her brown eyes. "I have a great mind to go home to mamma and Brother Willie."
Bruce Conway opened his sleepy eyes in polite amazement at this home-bred girl, whose pure modesty recoiled from what was so grateful to the ears of most modern belles.
"Well, but you are a novelty," he laughed. "In these days of women's rights, and shoddyism, and toadyism, and all the rest of the isms! Why, the majority of the belles of society would give their ears for a notice like that! That is why they court the journalists—assiduously inviting them to receptions, soirees, and the like. They always expect a flaming compliment. And new arrivals are always honored by a flattering notice. The thing is quite a la mode."
"Well, I do not like it. I think it is an abominable fashion," persisted the little maiden.
"I agree with you," said Bruce, seriously. "It is 'brushing the delicate bloom from the grape.' But don't air such opinions in public, Lulu, or Barnum will be wanting you for one of his curiosities."
His glance turned from her and roved down the society column—then he rose, his face a trifle paler, and crossing to the window, read a paragraph almost directly beneath the one which had incited the indignant protest of the little Norfolk beauty.
"And by the way, society will miss its most brilliant jewel from its setting, in the absence of the youthful and lovely Hon. Mrs. Winans, of Norfolk. Rumor reports that the fair lady is so devoted to her infant son that, with the concurrence of the indulgent Senator, she gladly foregoes the dissipations of fashionable life to watch the budding and unfolding of his infantile charms."
And it, this grandiloquent style society, which knew perfectly well all about the difference between Senator Winans and his lovely wife, was informed that he did not intend to bring her to Washington during the ensuing session of Congress.
Conway ground his firm white teeth.
"So he dares show the world how he neglects her," crushing the paper viciously in his hand as though it were Paul Winans himself. "Poor Gracie—poor wronged and injured girl!" sighing deeply. "Neither Winans nor I was worthy of her."
Lulu, who had resumed her seat, looked up wondering at the clouded brow and unintelligibly muttered words. He smiled, subduing his emotion by a strong effort of will.
"You have not told me yet what are your plans for to-day—ah! here comes my lady aunt. Dear madam, will you kindly designate what are your plans for to-day, and command your humble servant?"
Mrs. Conway smiled her brightest smile on her idol.
"Let me see," glancing at her watch: "only ten o'clock. You can be off for your morning cigar and stroll on the avenue—when you come back we will have decided."
He rose, handsome, smiling, debonaire, but desperately ennuied, and glad, if truth must be told, to get away. Small talk was a bore to him just then, in his perturbed mood. He picked up Lulu's embroidered handkerchief that she had carelessly let fall to the floor, and presenting it with a jaunty "by-by," went his way followed by their admiring eyes. He was his aunt's acknowledged idol; Lulu's unconscious one.
Mrs. Conway plunged at once into the subject of amusements for the day.
"Let us see—there is Mrs. R's reception at two—we musn't fail them. You will see the creme de la creme there, my dear. When we get away we will have a drive over to the little city of Alexandria; at six, dinner; at eight, the opera; at twelve, you and Bruce shall have an hour for the German at Mrs. Morton's ball, and then—well, home again."
"Quite an attractive programme," smiled her companion, from the depths of the "sleepy hollow."
Mrs. Conway smiled musingly, as she fixed her dark eyes on the pattern of autumn-tinted leaves that trailed over the velvet carpet.
"Yes," she said, with the indifference of one who is used to it all, "it is last season over again; it is all very charming to one unaccustomed to the round. Poor Gracie was here last winter—these, by the by, were her rooms then, the handsomest suite in the hotel—we went everywhere together. She enjoyed it all so much."
A look of interest warmed the listless gaze of Lulu. The pet curiosity of her soul was Grace Winans, heightened, perhaps, by an indefinable jealousy that went far back into the past, when Grace Grey's violet-pansy eyes had been the stars of Bruce Conway's adoration. She said, regretfully:
"Is it not a wonder that I have never seen Mrs. Winans? And there is no one I would like so much to see. Is she so very beautiful?"
"'Perfectly beautiful, faultily faultless,'" was Mrs. Conway's warmly accorded praise, "and as lovely in mind as in person. She inherits both qualities, I believe, from her mother, who was, I have heard, the most amiable and beautiful woman in Memphis to the day of her death."
"Ah! Is Mrs. Winans not a Virginian, then?"
"No, only by adoption. Her father was a slave-holder before the war—one of the out and out aristocrats of Memphis. He was a colonel in the Confederate army, and killed at the head of his regiment during the first of the war. He was a very noble young fellow, I believe, and devoted to his wife and little daughter. The wife died broken-hearted at his loss, and left this little Grace to the care of relatives, who placed her in a boarding-school, where she remained until the close of the war freed the slaves her father left her, and she was penniless. I advertised about this time for a companion; she answered, and I engaged her. She has been in Virginia ever since. She was just sixteen when she came to me—a charming child—she is about twenty-one now."
A tender throb of sympathy stirred Lulu's heart as she listened. Brought up in the warm fold of a mother's love, caressed, petted, beloved, all her life, she could vaguely conjecture how sad and loveless had been the brief years of Grace Grey's life.
"I regret that Bruce's unfortunate affair has, in some sort, put an end to our intimacy," Mrs. Conway went on, pensively. "I was fond of Grace, and had grown so used to her in her long stay with me, that she seemed almost like one of my own family. I would have been proud of her as my daughter. She might have been something almost as dear but for—well, let us call it an error of judgment on my part and my nephew's." She paused a moment, sighed deeply, and concluded with, "I would like you to know her, Lulu. Your brother admired her very much, I think."
"I think he did," Lulu answered, simply.
"Next week Congress convenes," said the older lady, brightening; "then I shall take you quite frequently to the capitol to hear the speeches of the eminent men. Winans will be there, I presume. I hear he has been traveling all summer, but he must, of course, be here in time for the session. He is quite a brilliant speaker, and was excessively admired last session."
"Has all the far-famed Louisiana eloquence and fire, I presume?" says Lulu, curiously.
"Yes, although he has been many years away from there, but he has the hot temper and unreasoning jealousy of the extreme South, as one may see from his cruel treatment of his wife and child."
"I have just seen him," said Bruce's voice at the door.
"Seen whom?"
"Winans, to be sure, the man you're talking of," sauntering in and flinging his handsome person recliningly on the divan and looking extremely bored and fatigued in spite of the shy smile that dawned on Lulu's lip at his entrance.
"Where did you see him?" Mrs. Conway queried, in some surprise and anxiety.
"Oh, tearing down the avenue on a magnificent black horse as if he were going to destruction as fast as the steed would carry him—that is just his reckless way though."
"You recognized each other?" his aunt made haste dubiously to inquire.
"Oh, certainly," says Bruce, with a light smile. "I threw away my cigar to make him a polite bow; he returned it with a freezing salutation, but there was something in his face that would have stirred a tender heart like Brownie's here into pity for him, though stronger ones like mine, for instance, acknowledge no such sentimental feelings."
"How did he look?" queried Brownie, unmoved by his half-jesting allusion to her.
"Like a proud man who was trampling on the heart he had torn from his bosom to save his pride; pale, cynical, melancholy, defiant—pshaw! That sounds like a novel, doesn't it, Lulu?"
"Poor Paul Winans!" she answered only; but the compassion in her voice for him was not so great as the pained sympathy that looked out of her speaking glance for Bruce Conway.
For Lulu saw with preternaturally clear vision, the struggle that was waging in the young man's soul; saw how truth, and honor and every principle of right were battling for one end—the overthrow of the love that having struck down its intertwining roots in his soul for years, was hard to be torn up. She pitied him—and, ah! pity is so near akin to love.
Something of her pity he read in her expressive face, and straightway set himself to work to dispel her gloom. Bruce never could bear to see the face of a beauty overshadowed.
"Brownie, have you tried that new song I sent you yesterday?"
Lulu confessed she had not.
"Try it now, then," he answered, rising, and throwing open the piano.
She rose, smiling and happy once more, and took the seat at the piano. He leaned by her side to turn the pages, and presently their voices rose softly together in a sweet and plaintive love-song. But his heart was full of another, and, as he turned the pages for Lulu with patient gallantry, he remembered how he had turned them for another, how his voice had risen thrillingly with hers in sweeter songs than this, mingling with her bird-like notes as it never should "mingle again."
CHAPTER IX.
"WHEN A WOMAN WILL, SHE WILL."
"Although
The airs of Paradise did fan the house,
And angels offic'd all, I will be gone!"
—Shakespeare.
"And underneath that face, like summer's oceans,
Its lip as noiseless, and its cheek as clear,
Slumbers a whirlwind of the heart's emotions,
Love—hatred—pride—hope—sorrow—all, save fear."
—Fitz-Green Halleck.
It was January, and the keen, cold sea-air swept over Norfolk, freezing the snow as it fell, and chilling the very marrow of the few pedestrians whom necessity compelled to be abroad that inclement morning. The fast-falling flakes obscured everything from view, but Mrs. Winans stood at a window of her elegant home gazing wistfully out at the scene, though the richly appointed room, the fragrance of rare exotic flowers that swung in baskets from the ceiling, the twitter of two restless mockingbirds, all invited her gaze to linger within. But the delicious warmth, the exquisite fragrance, the sweet bird-songs, held no charm for the fair and forlorn young wife to-day. Now and then she moved restlessly, disarranging the fleecy shawl of soft rose-color that was thrown about her shoulders, and turning at last, she began to walk swiftly across the floor, wringing her little white hands in a sort of impotent pain.
"I can't bear this, and I won't!" stopping suddenly, and stamping a tiny slippered foot on the velvet carpet that scarcely gave back the sound. "I am to stay here because he says so; because he chooses to desert me. He wearies, perhaps, of his fetters. Why cannot I go to Washington, if I choose, for a few days anyhow? I could go up to the capitol vailed, and see his face, hear his voice once more. Ah, heaven! that I should have to steal near enough to see him! My darling—beloved, though so cruel to me—how can I bear this and live? I must, must go—must look in for the last time in life, on your dear, too cruelly dear face!"
The violet eyes brightened strangely as the words fell from her lips whose firm curves showed a fixed resolution.
"Yes," she whispered to herself, firmly, "I will go!"
What was it that seemed to clutch at her heart like an icy hand, freezing in her veins the warm blood that but a moment before had bounded with passionate joy at thought of seeing her husband again? What meant that chill presentiment of evil that seemed to whisper to her soul, "You are wrong—do not go!"
"I will go!" she said again, as if in defiance of that inward monitor, and folding her arms across her breast, she resumed her slow walk across the floor.
The pretty shawl fell from her shoulders, and lay, like a great brilliant rose, unheeded on the floor; the long, sweeping train of her blue cashmere morning-dress flowed over it as she walked, the white ermine on her breast and at her throat trembling with the agitated throbs of her heart. Her pure, pale cheek, her eyes darkening under their black lashes, the white, innocent brow, the mobile lips, all showed the trace of suffering bravely borne; but now the patient spirit, tried too deeply, rose within her in desperate rebellion.
For this one time she would take her own way, right or wrong. Go to Washington she would, see her husband, herself unseen, once more, she would; then she would go back to her dull, wearisome life—her rebellion extended no farther than that. But she wanted, oh, so much, to see how he looked; to see if suffering had written its dreary line on his face as on hers; to see him because—well—because her whole warm, womanly heart hungered, thirsted for a sight of the dusk-proud beauty of her husband's face.
The honest Irish face of Norah, entering with little Paul, clouded as she took in the scene. She had grown wise enough to read the signs of emotion in the face of the young lady, and now she saw the stamp of pain too plainly written there to be misunderstood.
"Pretty mamma!" lisped the toddling baby, stumbling over the pink shawl in his eagerness to grasp the skirt of the blue dress in his baby fingers.
She stooped and lifted her idol in her arms, pressing him closely and warmly to her aching heart.
"What should I do without my baby, my darling? Why, I should die," she cried, impulsively, as she sunk among a pile of oriental cushions and began to play with the little fellow, her soft laugh blending with his as he caught at her long sunny curls, his favorite playthings, and wound them like golden strands about his fingers.
The shadow of her clouded life never fell upon her child. In her darkest hours she was always ready to respond to his mirth, to furnish new diversion for his infant mind, though sometimes her heart quailed with a great pang of bitterness as the laughing dark eyes, so like his father's, looked brightly up into her face.
But sad as her life was, it would have been unendurable without her baby. He was so bright, so intelligent, so full of rosy, sturdy health and beauty. The slowly increasing baby-teeth, the halting baby-walk, the incoherent attempts at speech, were all sources of daily interest to Grace, who was ardently fond of babies in general, and her own in particular. And this baby did for Grace Winans what many another baby has done for many another wretched wife—saved her heart from breaking.
"Norah," she said, looking suddenly up with a flitting blush, "what do you say to a trip to Washington next week, after this snow-storm is quite cleared away—do you think it would be safe for little Paul?"
"Hurt him! I think not. He is so strong and healthy; but has the Senator written for you to come on?" asked Norah, eagerly.
"No"—her brow clouded, and that warm flush hung out its signal-flag on her cheek again—"he has not. I do not mean for him to know anything about it. I shall stay but a day or two, only taking you and baby; then we shall return as quietly as we went, and no one be the wiser; and now, Norah, baby is falling asleep, take him to his nursery, and bring me the Washington papers, if they have come in yet."
"They came hours ago; it is eleven o'clock, Mrs. Winans, and you have taken no breakfast yet. Won't you have it sent up here to you?" said the kind-hearted nurse, solicitously.
"Have I not taken breakfast? I believe I do not want any; I have been thinking so intently I have lost my appetite, and was actually forgetting that I had not breakfasted," then noting the pained look that shaded Norah's face, "Oh, well, you may bring me a glass of milk with the papers."
But Norah, after depositing her sleeping burden in his crib in the nursery, brought with the papers a waiter holding a cup of warm cocoa, a broiled partridge, stewed oysters, warm muffins and fresh butter, the specified glass of milk crowning all. Depositing the waiter on a little marble table, she wheeled up a comfortable chair and installed Mrs. Winans therein.
"You are to take your breakfast first," she said, with the authority of a privileged domestic, "then you can read the papers."
She laid them on a stand by the side of her mistress and softly withdrew to the nursery. And lifting the glass of milk to her lips with one hand, Grace took up the Washington Chronicle with the other and ran her eyes hastily over the columns, devouring the bits of Congressional news.
As she read her cheek glowed, her pearly teeth showed themselves in a smile half-pleased, half-sorrowful. Praise of her husband could not but be dear to her, but her pride in him was tempered by the thought that he cared not that she—his wife—should be witness of and sharer in his triumphs.
And turning away from the record of his brilliant speech on Southern affairs, she glanced indolently down the column of society news, recognizing among the names of women who stood high in the social scale many who had been among her most intimate friends the preceding winter. She had been the queen of them all then, reigning by right of her beauty and intellect no less than by her wealth and high position—best of all, queen of her husband's heart—and as the thought of all that she had been "came o'er the memory of her doom," the dethroned queen sprang from her chair and paced the floor again, burning with passionate resentment, stirred to her soul's deepest depths with the bitter leaven of scorn, not less a queen to-day though despoiled of her kingdom.
And thus one vassal, still loyal, found her as the servant ushered him quite unceremoniously into the bright little parlor, startling her for a moment as he came forward, a few wisps of snow still clinging to his brown curls, and melting and dripping down upon his shoulders in the pleasant warmth diffused around.
She glanced at him, shrank back an instant, then came forward with rising color and extended hand.
"Captain Clendenon! This is indeed a pleasant and very welcome surprise."
He bowed low over the slim white hand, murmured some inarticulate words of greeting, and stooped to replace the shawl that still lay unheeded where she had dropped it on the floor.
"Allow me," he said, with grave courtesy, and folded it with his one arm very carefully, though perhaps awkwardly, about her shoulders.
Then a momentary embarrassing silence ensued, during which he had seated himself in a chair indicated by her, and opposite the one into which she had languidly fallen.
In that silence she glanced a little curiously at the face whose dark gray eyes had not yet lifted themselves to hers. She had not seen him in some months before, and he looked a little altered now—somewhat thinner, a trifle more serious, but still frank and noble, and with an indescribable respect and sympathy in the clear, honest eyes that lifted just then and met her glance full.
"I must ask your pardon for intruding on the entire seclusion that you preserve, Mrs. Winans," he said, with the slight pleasant smile she remembered so well. "The fact that I am your husband's lawyer, and that I come on business, must plead my excuse."
She bowed, then rallied from her surprise sufficiently to say that an old and valued friend like Captain Clendenon needed no excuse to make him welcome in her home.
A faint flush of gratification tinged his white forehead an instant, then faded as a look of pain on the lovely face before him showed that some indefinable dread of his mission to her filled her mind.
"I am not the bearer of any ill news," he hastened to remark.
"Ah! thank you—I am glad," the fading color flowing back to her lips, "we women are so nervous at thought of ill news—and—and I get so depressed sometimes—I suppose all women do—that I can conjure up all sorts of terrors at that word—the woman's bugbear—'business.'"
"Yes, I presume all women do get depressed who preserve such inviolate seclusion as you do, Mrs. Winans," he answered, gravely, "and that brings me to my object in coming here this morning. I had a letter from your husband yesterday, in which he made special mention of you in alluding to various reports which have reached him relative to your utter retirement from society."
"Well," she asked, coldly, as he paused, a little disconcerted by her steady gaze, and by his consciousness of touching on a delicate subject.
"And," he went on, "your husband seemed annoyed, or rather fearful that your health might suffer from such unwonted seclusion. He begged me to speak with you on the subject, and assure you that he would rather hear that you took pleasure in the society of your friends, and passed your time in walking, driving, and, in short, all the usual pursuits that are so conducive to your health and the diversion of your mind from brooding over troubles that cannot at present be remedied."
