In this surmise she was quite correct. Jess wheeled about from the picture, and flinging herself on a hassock at Queenie’s feet, she buried her young face in her false friend’s lap, exclaiming:
“Ah! but I have had a most thrilling experience, I assure you, Queenie. May I tell you all about it?”
“If you like, dear,” was the answer, and she lowered her white lids over her eyes that Jess might not see the hard, steely glitter in them should she chance to look up suddenly.
“I did throw over a lover and a fortune into the bargain, because I could not like, let alone love the man whom I would have had to wed to gain the money, though the loss of it made me—a pauper!”
“What a romance!” cried Queenie. “Do tell me all about it, dear—who would have ever dreamed that you, who look so much like a child, had ever contemplated marriage, let alone decided so important a step.”
“It is romantic,” said Jess, slowly. “I doubt if any other young girl in the whole wide world ever had such a strange experience as mine has been.” And, glad enough to find so attentive and sympathetic a listener, Jess, with the confiding innocence of youth, proceeded to narrate to her new-found friend the story of her life; how, from the first recollection she had had, she had been a part and parcel of Blackheath Hall, yet had lived a life wholly apart from its inmates.
If Queenie had not conceived, down deep in her heart, a deadly hatred of this girl whom fate had decreed for John Dinsmore, the man she loved, she would have been moved to pity by Jess’ recital.
“I have no recollection of a home, or a mother,” continued Jess, resting her dimpled chin on her pink palms, her elbows on Queenie’s knee, and her large, dark, soulful eyes gazing up into the wine-dusk eyes looking down into her own. “The knowledge of that was my earliest grief. I seemed to be like Topsy—‘just growed there, nobody knowed how,’ as that waif and stray expressed it.
“I was there on sufferance, as it were. I belonged to nobody, and nobody belonged to, or took the least interest, in me. I roamed where I would, as neglected a specimen of humanity as one would wish to see. I had no friends save the birds in the deep woods, and the wild animals I had trained and made comrades of.
“My one passion was reading. I scarcely know how I ever managed to learn how to decipher the stories that I was so fond of. One of the old colored mammies about the plantation had learned to read and write, and taught me as much as she knew—my education ended there. Once a year the cast-off clothing of the housekeeper was made over for me—that was all the interest ever exhibited in me. Nobody ever took the trouble to ask if I were sick or well, satisfied with my strange lot, or lonely, if I had a heart within my bosom that longed for companionship and sympathy, or how I even existed.