"Ask me no questions now; by-and-bye you will know all about it; the money is mine. I have earned it honestly; as much more is all that I have in the world. No thanks! I never could bear them, besides it will be repaid in time!"
"If I live," said Robert, with tears in his eyes.
"This week, remember—this week you must be absent. A visit to the old homestead, anything that will take you out of town."
"I will go," said Robert, "it can certainly do no harm."
And they parted.
Ada Leicester fled from the keen disappointment which almost crushed her for a time, and sought to drown all thought in the whirl of fashionable life. Her reception evenings were splendid. Beauty, talent, wit, everything that could charm or dazzle gathered beneath her roof. She gave herself no time for grief. Occasionally a thought of her husband would sting her into fresh bursts of excitement—sometimes the memory of her parents and her child passed over her heart, leaving a swell behind like that which followed the angels when they went down to trouble the still waters. Her wit grew more sparkling, her graceful sarcasm keener than ever it had been. She was the rage that season, and exhausted her rich talent in efforts to win excitement. She did not hope for happiness from the homage and splendor that her beauty and wealth had secured; excitement was all she asked.
When all other devices for amusement failed to keep up the fever of her artificial life, she bethought her of a new project. Her talent, her wealth must achieve something more brilliant than had yet been dreamed of, she would give a fancy ball, something far more picturesque than had ever been known in Saratoga or Newport.
At first Ada thought of this ball only as a something that should pass like a rocket through the upper ten thousand; but as the project grew upon her, she resolved to make it an epoch in her own inner life. The man whom she had loved, the husband who had so coldly trampled her to the earth in her seeming poverty—he should witness this grand gala—he should see her in the fall blaze of her splendid career. There was something of proud retaliation in this; she fancied that it was resentful hate that prompted this desire to see and triumph over the man who had scorned her. Alas! poor woman, was there no lurking hope?—no feeling that she dared not call by its right name in all that wild excitement?
She sent for Jacob, and besought him to devise some means by which Leicester should be won to attend the ball, without suspecting her identity.