Viola agreed with a blush of pleasure, and after some consultation four ferns were selected. The visitor was amazed at their cheapness, but concealed her astonishment. Then she bought three dozen jars of the jam. She did not pay for them, but said that on the following day she would send the money by a messenger, who would also bring away the purchases.
Standing in the doorway, about to leave, she said:
“I’m glad to have seen you. It’s so interesting for a person like me, who can’t do anything, to meet some one who is clever and of use in the world. Good-by!” She held out her hand, and Viola, surprised, put hers into it. “Don’t forget to keep our secret. It makes a person feel like a conspirator, doesn’t it? I think, too, Colonel Reed’s quite right to want to be reticent about business matters. So you and I’ll keep dark about this little transaction of ours.”
This was the most diplomatic sentence Letitia had ever given vent to in her life.
She walked slowly away from the house, her eyes downcast in thought. The superb health she had inherited from an untainted peasant ancestry made her imagination dull, and lightened such sufferings as she had encountered in her easy, care-free life. Even now she experienced none of those fierce pangs that jealousy and disappointed love provoke in the women of a more sophisticated stock. She was made on that large, calm plan on which an all-wise nature creates the maternal woman—she whose destiny it is to bear strong children to a stalwart sire. But this afternoon, for the first time in her life, she knew what it was to feel her heart lying heavy in her breast like a thing of stone.
It was late when she reached home. Mrs. Gault was to give a dinner that evening, and as Letitia passed through the hall she caught a glimpse of her sister, in a loose creation of pink silk and lace, which swelled out behind her like a sail, hurrying round the bedecked dining-table, followed by two meek and attentive Chinamen. Knowing the indignation of Maud should she be late, she ran to her room and made her toilet with the utmost speed.
She was just completing this important rite, and, seated at her dressing-table under a blaze of electric light, was selecting an aigret for her hair, when the door opened and Mrs. Gault entered.
She had discarded her ebullient draperies of pink silk, and was sheathed tightly in her favorite yellow, from which the olive skin of her bared neck emerged in polished smoothness. As she came forward she had one hand full of diamond brooches, which she pinned with apparent carelessness round the edge of the low bodice.
“Well, Tishy,” she said, sitting down by the dressing-table, “what happened?”