“I am folding it up to put in my pocket. It is a very important paper, and perhaps you might lose it.”
“Oh, no, I am not likely to do that,” said the other, earnestly. “I have kept that paper and the ring my husband gave me ever since I was a young and wicked girl. Don’t put it in your pocket. I shall want it, you know, to show it to my son.”
“But I don’t mean to let you show it to your son.” And she sipped her parfait amour.
“Not let me! Why not?”
“Because I don’t wish your son to become a squire and a magistrate. He would be too proud to remember his old friends.”
“Oh, Laura!” cried the miserable mother, “you cannot find it in your heart to hold him back from a life of honesty and drive him to sin and death. Ah, woman, you have made him everything that’s bad. Have you not done enough?”
“No!” shrieked Laura, rising to her feet—“no, I have not done enough, for, do you know, woman, how this precious son of yours turned round upon me?”
“No, I never heard.”
“Hark ye, woman! I knelt to that man—I, Laura Stanbridge—and he spurned me as if I had been a leper. I became a woman for once, and I was trodden on. Do you think I am likely to serve him—the recreant, heartless scoundrel? No, no, madam. You know little of me if you imagine I can forget the bitter wrong done me. I fostered a serpent, and now I both hate and despise this precious sample of manhood. Go your ways. Do as you will—you cannot count on any assistance from me. Find him if you can—but I tell you once and for all that I have done with him.”
Mrs. Grover listened to this sudden burst of fury at first with a shudder, afterwards with an icy calmness.