It was fully two weeks before Rose remembered her promise; then she came suddenly one morning when Harry had gone away “queer” and the baby was suffering and cross, and the whole house a little affected by the tone of the heads of it. Rose was also cross, though she was sumptuously clothed in green velvet and golden beaver. She looked rather contemptuously round Adriana’s parlor. “I wonder you put up with this house, Yanna,” she said. “Harry ought to be ashamed of himself.”
“I am very well pleased with my house, Rose; and very happy in it. You have grown used to palaces abroad. And Antony is so much richer than Harry.”
“Harry could do better than he does. I do not understand how you endure his behavior.”
“Rose, if you love me, say nothing wrong of Harry.”
“He behaves too badly for anything. Mamma says the money he spends is dreadful! How do you bear it? I am sorry for you!”
“I am not the only one who has to bear. Constantly, I feel sorry for Antony.”
“What do you mean? What has Antony told you? At least Antony is true as gold to me. I would not suffer a husband like Harry. I would divorce him. Why, Cora——”
“Rose! You must cease at once, or I must leave you. You have nothing to do with my husband.”
“He is my brother, and the whole town talks of him.”
Then Yanna left her sister-in-law, and in a few minutes she heard her carriage go clattering up the street; but she sat still and tearless in the little low chair which stood by the nursery fire. Her boy was 213 taking a drive with his nurse, and she was quite alone in the room sacred to his innocent life. She kept the anger in her heart behind her closed lips, but she reflected that patience might cease to be a virtue; and that the time had come to demand from Harry some explanation of the rumors and accusations that had reached her.