“I will wear them to-night, and thank the kind donor in person,” said Miss Helmstedt, putting it beside her book on the stand.
Mrs. Houston then bustled out of the room, leaving the young girl to her coveted quiet.
Late in the afternoon, the Christmas party began to assemble—a mixed company of about forty individuals, comprising old, middle-aged, and young persons of both sexes. The evening was spent, according to programme, in tea-drinking, parlor games, tableaux, cards and conversation, i. e., gossip, i. e., scandal.
Among all the gayly attired young persons present Margaret Helmstedt, in her mourning-dress, with her black hair plainly braided around her fair, broad forehead, was pronounced not only the most beautiful, but by far the most interesting; her beauty, her orphanage, her heiress-ship, her extreme youth, and her singular position as a betrothed bride in the house of her father-in-law, all invested with a prestige of strange interest this fair young creature.
But, ah! her very pre-eminence among her companions, instigated the envious to seize upon, and use against her, any circumstance that might be turned to her disadvantage. Whispers went around. Sidelong glances were cast upon her.
As a daughter of the house, she shook off her melancholy pre-occupation, and exerted herself to entertain the visitors.
But matrons, whose daughters she had thrown into the shade, could not forgive her for being “talked of,” and received all her hospitable attentions with coldness. And the maidens who had been thus overshadowed took their revenge in curling their lips and tossing their heads, as she passed or smiled upon them.
Now Margaret Helmstedt was neither insensible, cold, nor dull; on the contrary, she was intelligent to perceive, sensitive to feel, and reflective to refer this persecution back to its cause. And though no one could have judged from her appearance how much she suffered under the infliction; for, through all the trying evening, she exhibited the same quiet courtesy and ladylike demeanour; the iron entered her soul.
Only when the festival was over, the guests departed, the lights put out, and she found herself at liberty to seek the privacy of her own chamber, she dropped exhausted beside her bed, and burying her face in the coverlid, sighed forth:
“Oh, mother! mother! Oh, mother! mother!”