“Then I think it very providential that she is here now. Oh, I am very inexperienced and helpless! Pina, I think I should like to see your mother and have a little talk with her. When you take away this service you may bring her up.”
“Oh yes, ma’am! thank you, ma’am. She’ll be so glad to pay her ’spects to you,” said the girl, delighted that the proposal she had so much dreaded to make, had been so kindly received.
But the moment Pina left the room, Drusilla fell back upon her pillow in a storm of sobs and tears, and gasping forth at intervals:
“Oh, Alick! Alick dear, to leave me at such a time as this, and I so friendless and so ignorant, I might die! I wish I could!”
After a few moments, hearing footsteps on the stairs, she ceased sobbing, and tried to compose herself.
Pina discreetly knocked at the door.
“Wait a moment,” said Drusilla, wiping her eyes and smothering the last convulsive throes of her bosom. And then——“Come in,” she called.
Pina entered, showing in her mother.
Drusilla turned with forced calmness to welcome the stranger.
“How do you do? What is your name?” she inquired, in a gentle tone.