Mrs. Shackleton gave a shrug and rose to her feet. The girl was incomprehensible. She was either very subtile and deep, or she was extraordinarily dull and shallow. Shackleton had said to her once that she seemed to him childish and undeveloped, for her age. The woman’s keen eye saw deeper. If Mariposa was not disingenuous, she would always, on the side of shrewdness and worldly wisdom, be undeveloped.
“Well, my dear,” she said coldly, “it all rests with yourself. But I can’t, conscientiously, let you throw your best chances away. We won’t speak of this any more to-day. But go home and think about it, and in a week or two let me know what conclusion you’ve come to. Don’t ever throw a chance away, even if you don’t happen to like the person who offers it.”
She gave Mariposa a shrewd and good-natured smile. The girl, her face crimsoning, was about to answer, when the hall door opened, and, with a sound of laughter and a whiff of violets, Maud and the Count de Lamolle entered the room.
In her heavy mourning, Maud looked more nearly pretty than she had ever done before. It was not the dress that beautified her, but the happiness of her engagement to Latimer, with whom she was deeply in love, which had lent her the fleeting grace and charm that only love, well bestowed, can give. She carried a large bunch of violets in her hand, and her face was slightly flushed.
The count, who had attentively read the will of Jake Shackleton in the papers, was staying on in San Francisco. His attentions to Maud were not more assiduous, but they were more “serious,” to use the technical phrase, than heretofore. She would make him an ideal wife, he thought. Even her lack of beauty was an advantage. When an American girl was both rich and pretty, she was more than even the most tactful and sophisticated Frenchman could manage. Maud, ugly, gentle, and not clever, would be a delightful wife, ready to love humbly, unexacting, easy to make happy.
The count, a handsome, polished Parisian, speaking excellent English, bowed over Mrs. Shackleton’s hand, and then, in answer to her words of introduction, shot an exploring look, warmed by a glimmer of discreet admiration, at Mariposa. He wondered who she was, for his practised eye took in at a glance that she was shabbily dressed and evidently not of the world of bonanza millions. He wished that he knew her, now that he had made up his mind to spend some months in San Francisco, paying court to the heiress who would make him such an admirable wife, and in whose society time hung so heavily on his hands.
Mariposa excused herself and hurried away. She was angry and confused. It seemed to her she had done nothing but be rude and obstinately stupid, while the cold and composed older woman had eyed her with wary attentiveness. What did Mrs. Shackleton think she had meant? She felt that the widow had not, for a moment, abandoned the scheme of sending her away. Descending the wide steps in the early dark, the girl realized that the woman she had just left was not going to be beaten from her purpose by what appeared a girl’s unreasonable caprice.
A man coming up the steps brushed by her, paused for a moment, and then mechanically raised his hat. In the gleam of the lamps, held aloft at the top of the flight, she recognized the thin face and eye-glasses of Win Shackleton. She did not return the salute, as it was completely unexpected, and from the foot of the stairs she heard the hall door bang behind him.
“Who was that girl I met on the steps just now, going out?” Win asked his mother, as they went upstairs together.
“That Miss Moreau your father was interested in. He was going to send her to Paris to learn singing.”