LAURA STANBRIDGE AND PURVIS’S MOTHER IN THE RESTAURANT.
A waiter, with shaved cheeks, and a small black moustache of the true Frenchman style, answered the call.
“Une verre de parfait amour,” said Miss Stanbridge.
He bowed, vanished, and returned with a tiny glass filled with a liquor red as a girl’s lips, luscious, and perfumed as the nectar of the gods.
“Now, my dear Mrs. Grover,” said Laura, as she sipped the beverage and reclined in a voluptuous attitude, “I am all attention. Pray tell me what you have to discourse about. The wickedness and vanity of the world—or what?”
“There is no occasion for you to make a jest of a subject which to me is, alas! a most serious one,” returned her companion. “I have come to ask what you have done with my child.”
“Your child?” cried Laura, raising her eyebrows. “The person to whom you allude is no longer a child.”
“Well, then, my son, if that term pleases you better.”
“We will not dispute about terms—I presume you allude to a young man who was at one my time protégé.”