"Well, Rose was handsome, as I told you, though she didn't know it, and good as she was handsome; but sad-like, for she never had any body to love her. I don't think she was sorry to leave her aunt, but still you know the world is a great wide cold place to push a young thing like that out into. However, she started off with her little trunk to Mrs. Graw's school.
"Mrs. Graw used to be chambermaid to a real Count's wife, and as soon as she found out that Rose was a poor relation, she kinder trod her down, and the school-girls disliked her, because she was handsomer than they, and so she was miserable enough, till she made the acquaintance of Captain Vincent, who took her away from school, to be married, as he said, and then ran off and left her. Of course, her aunt was dreadful hard on her, and drove her almost crazy with her reproaches. She wouldn't believe any thing she said about her being really married; and was just as bitter as if she herself hadn't been man-hunting all her life.
"She held Rose off at arm's length, as if the poor betrayed child's touch were poison; shut her doors in her face, and all that; and why the poor thing didn't take to bad ways nobody knows. She went to a Lying-in Hospital, and staid there till the babe was born, and then there was a great noise, when it was found out how rich her aunt was; and when Mrs. Howe found out that people's tongues were wagging about it, she came forward and offered to pay her board in the country awhile.
"Mrs. Howe herself lives up in St. John's Square. She is trying to ride into fashionable society with her carriage and liveried servants; and that poor girl so heart-broken.
"Well, the Lord only knows what is going to become of poor Rose! Beauty and misery—beauty and misery—I've seen what came of that partnership before now."
CHAPTER XXX.
Mrs. Bond had drank her cup of tea and eaten her one slice of toast. Rose had not yet come down to breakfast, and she hesitated to disturb her slumbers. So she put the tea-pot down by the fire, covered over the toast, and sat back in her great leathern chair.
How beautiful they looked, Rose and the boy, the night before, when she crept in, shading her lamp with her hand, to see if they were comfortable. The boy's rosy cheek lay close to his mother's blue-veined breast, and one of his little dimpled arms was thrown carelessly about her neck. Rose with her long hair unbound vailing her neck and shoulders, the tears still glistening on her long lashes, heaving now and then a sigh that it was pitiful to hear.