It occurred to Rosamond that His Friggets’ extravagance in this one direction was fortunate for her, to-day, since it not only provided her with lunch but with refreshments for her guests of the evening. There were two large trembling jellies, bowls of cream, a junket, a whole roasted chicken and a whole boiled one—[“I’ll turn the boiled one into a salad for to-night,” she thought]—cold ham, which had been boiled in a pot of Amanda’s own brew of currant wine, and half a dozen quart bottles of the parsnip wine, considered by Amanda, metaphorically speaking, as the diamond in her crown. All Roseborough admitted that Amanda Frigget’s parsnip wine was so good, so golden, and so lively, that it both looked and tasted “exactly like champagne, except that, instead of the regular champagne taste, it had the taste of parsnips.”
Rosamond appropriated the roast chicken and found bread and butter also for her needs. To these she added a tall glass of foamy milk. A crock filled with cookies was another pleasant discovery.
She pictured to herself, amid giggles, the expressions that would adorn the faces of Amanda and Jemima and all Roseborough if they could see the distinguished Hibbert Mearely’s widow perched on the end of the kitchen table eating with her fingers.
“I suppose, if I were a born lady, I’d starve because there’s no one here to set my lunch before me properly,” she thought, “well, there are advantages in having a pedigree of butter pats.”
As one second joint, followed by the other, was nipped all around neatly to the bone, and the milk followed the chicken fragments, Rosamond’s indefinable sorrow vanished. She hung Amanda’s apron on its hook, and ran upstairs to wash her face and hands and catch up a loosened curl or two.
She had decided to spend the afternoon hours in a nook she knew by the river, not a stone’s throw from the bell tower. It was the loveliest spot in the valley and, unseen, one might watch the three roads that crossed one another at the tower. She needed a parasol, and ignoring the four black ones—one with lavender flowers—and the two black and white ones—the latest with a white chiffon frill—which, in their appointed order, had screened her grieved countenance during the last four years—she selected a shot silk of a grass green, its brightness tempered with silver gray. As she set out from the house now, with its silken shade arched over her bright hair and bringing out every bit of life there was in her skin and her gown, even Mr. Albert Andrews could not have doubted that the young widow’s mourning days were over.
With her hand on the latch of her gate, she paused. Far down the road, just on the near side of the bridge, she perceived Blake returning with the obstreperous mare. Even while she looked, she saw Florence rear and dart off down the road to Poplars. There was a trotting on the gravel road immediately round the curve of Villa Rose’s line. In a moment the rider had reined in at the gate and uncovered in salute to her.
“I hope he doesn’t think he has come to make a special call—he looks all dressed up—because I’m not going indoors again,” was her mental greeting. Aloud, she said, cordially, “Good afternoon, Judge Giffen.”
