Miss Palametta tittered coldly.
“It’s a sort that never grew in a border of fragrant remembrance round a last resting-place,” the eldest and Scotchest of the MacMillans bur-r-red at her, sternly.
Anabeth Pelham-Hew’s eyes filled with tears; not only did her lip tremble, but her chin wagged, with the volume and velocity of the fear that seized her.
“You—you—you’ve had one husband, you—you greedy thing!” She flung herself on Anabel’s breast and cried hysterically.
“Well! I never!” Rosamond exclaimed hotly.
“Anabeth is su-subject to hys-s-teria,” Justinia explained, as if all Roseborough did not know it. Roseborough held pronounced views regarding Anabeth’s hysteria; views which coincided with Blake’s on the cavorting of Eve and the remedy for it.
Never since she had come to reside in Villa Rose as milady, had a Roseborough spinster shown Mrs. Mearely anything but an almost sycophantic homage. But never until to-day had Mrs. Mearely clashed with a Roseborough spinster’s hopes. Words and breath left her as she saw herself—so recently an object of adulation—confronted with one dozen enemies.
“For my part, I’d be astounded if there were anything in this,” Miss Graham averred, with another tug at her choker; “because I can’t see how a widow could be induced to hang herself a second time. Nothing—nothing disgusts me like....”
“It’s a great shock to all of us to see you in colours again,” Flora Macdonald MacMillan broke in. “In all your days of mourning, no other hearts have beaten in such unison with yours as ours. We, the girls of Roseborough, have felt almost as if we were widows with you.”
“Yes,” her sister, Jeanie Deans, chimed in, “the girls of Roseborough loved to think of you as so beautiful and so sad, and forever alone.”