“To Miss Ray’s, I think,” she said faintly. “Nita may know their plans. Here’s the address,” taking a little book from her pocket, and ruffling over the leaves, “you must find it. I can’t see. O, but I can walk!” as he hailed a cab, and helped her into it, finding the address and jumping after her, while she sank back in the corner.
Very small and shrunken did she look when he took her out at the door leading to rooms over a stationer’s shop. The sisters were somewhat better off than formerly, though good old Miss Ray was half ashamed of it, since it was chiefly owing to the liberal allowance from Mrs. Brownlow for the chaperonage in which she felt herself to have so sadly failed.
Jock saw his mother safe in the hands of the kind old lady, heard that the pair were really gone, and departed for his interview with Mr. Wakefield. No sooner had the papers been signed, and the £500 made over to them, than the Hermanns had hurried away a fortnight earlier than they had spoken of going. It was much like an escape from creditors, but the reason assigned was an invitation to lecture in New York.
So there was nothing for it but to put up with Miss Ray’s account of Janet, and even that was second-hand, for the gentle spirit of the good old lady had been so roused at the treachery of the stolen marriage that she had refused to see the couple, and when Nita had once brought them in, she had retired to her bedroom.
Nita was gone on a professional engagement into the country for a week. According to what she had told her sister, Demetrius and Janet were passionately attached, and his manner was only too endearing; but Miss Ray had disliked the subject so much that she had avoided it in a way she now regretted.
“Everything I have done has turned out wrong,” she said with tears running down her cheeks. “Even this! I would give anything to be able to tell you of poor Janet, and yet I thought my silence was for the best, for Nita and I could not mention her without quarrelling as we had never done before. O, Mrs. Brownlow, I can’t think how you have ever forgiven me.”
“I can forgive every one but myself,” said Caroline sadly. “If I had understood how to be a better mother, this would never have been.”
“You! the most affectionate and devoted.”
“Ah! but I see now it was only human love without the true moving spring, and so my poor child grew up without it, and these are the fruits.”
“But my dear, my dear, one can’t give these things. Poor Janet always was a headstrong girl, like my poor Nita. I know what you mean, and how one feels that if one had been better oneself,” said poor Miss Ray, ending in utter entanglement, but tender sympathy.