She did not wish to pursue the conversation further, as her mind and inclinations were bent on the completion of the match between her daughter and the wealthy Southerner, Col. Coutell.
But Gwendoline persisted in talking of her cousin, as her mother moved restlessly about the room.
“You know they were not happy, mamma,” said the girl, in a low tone, fraught with tears,—“and—and—I am sorry for him, the—the husband she left.”
“Well!” said her mother, impatiently, “he might get a divorce.”
“Get—a—divorce!”—and the figure lying half-dressed before her sat up, drying her eyes, and, looking in her face, with a startled expression, exclaimed: “Am I dreaming? Did you say that?”
“Yes,” replied Mrs. Gwinn; “I said he might get a divorce; but on what grounds I know not.”
She walked to the windows, shook out the curtains, straightened a chair or two, in an aimless fashion, thinking, for the first time, that she detected a chord in her daughter’s voice and a look of the love she had once half-suspected that she entertained for the handsome blond who had married her niece.
“Might get I said, Gwendoline,” she repeated, “but such things don’t grow on trees, as forbidden fruit does. Ah! here is Alice to undress you. Take off your clothes and go to bed; it is better to dream than weep.”
Closing her door, the mother went to her couch to plan the campaign of the morn. Weary was the woman of the struggle to keep up appearances. Surrounded in her early youth by every luxury, she bore but indifferently the adversities of poverty. Her daughter’s beauty had won many admirers, but none so worthy as Col. Morris Coutell, a man of ancient lineage, possessing large estates and living alone on his inheritance, a home of vast proportions, where the mocking bird sang amid the countless trees, and flowers waved their beauties in the ever blowing breezes of the “Father of Waters.”
To dream like this sought she her pillow, picturing Gwendoline the mistress of all, a fit queen to reign over field and home, over master and slave. But to that daughter came visions less charming. Into her fitful slumber crept unwelcome images; men and women in turmoil and the dust and glare of crowded grounds seemed ever to make for themselves a picture on her brain, and fill the night with horrors, till dawn came and brought with its gray garments the coldness of despair.