“A duke, I suppose? Well, you must make haste, Winnie, there are not many dukes left nowadays.”
And though fate had unkindly withheld a coronet from Winnie, she had secured the best means to save herself from poverty and obscurity in her marriage with a man, whom, up to that time, she had always sneered at.
Polly could recall countless times when she had suffered many little pangs on account of those same sneers.
Hubert’s brogue, his boyish manners, his open-hearted sincerity, all had been the target for Winnie’s contempt.
“A rawboned Irishman,” she had once called him, when, by some kind of instinct, she had gathered the delicate secret that was forming in Polly’s heart. “I hate being seen anywhere with Hubert, he is so loud, and attracts so much attention. I call him vulgar.”
And now she was the wife of the “vulgar, rawboned Irishman,” and her mission appeared to be to let Polly, out of all the world, understand what a fine and enviable position this wifedom was.
Polly could have laughed had her heart been less sore, and her spirits less weary.
When Grace came to see her, she was shocked to find the girl looking so thin and worn.
She herself was scarcely in better trim.
There had been much to try Grace in connection with her grandmother’s death.