"And you found him a perfect dear, didn't you?" she murmured ecstatically.
"Well, I don't know that I did," faltered Brother Bob, placing a kiss on the top of her head. "The fact is, Sally, we've decided to call it off!"
"Bob, you haven't broken the engagement!"
Her lisping voice turned suddenly metallic. She stared from her brother to her niece, a sylph no longer, but a woman of forty-five, pale with apprehension and anger.
"Phyllis has made a mistake, that's all," he said. "He looked very nice in the show-window, but now we are going to take him back, and get a credit-slip for something we want more."
"A new automobile coat for Papa," put in Phyllis mischievously.
"And you can both laugh about it!" exclaimed Aunt Sarah in appalled accents. "Laugh at throwing over J. Whitlock Pastor! Oh, you little Carthage nobodies--haven't you any sense at all--don't you know what you are doing--isn't he as much a duke with us as any Marlborough or Newcastle in England? He was too good; he was too nice; he wasn't enough of a snob to blow and brag--and that's what he gets for it, the 'No' of a silly girl, who'd prefer a barber's block clerk to the greatest gentleman in America!"
She tottered to the mantelpiece and burst into tears--the first tears she had shed in twenty worldly and scheming years--and the only tears that did attend the rupture of the Pastor-Ladd engagement.
CHAPTER IV
There was the usual chatter, the usual slanders, the usual innuendoes that follow such an event. Charming little assassins, in Paquin gowns and picture hats flew about sticking pins into Phyllis' reputation. Those worse gossips, the clubs, were not behindhand either; and old gentlemen, who ought to have known better, unctuously laid their heads together and passed the lies along. It is so much the custom to dwell on the good side of human nature that we are apt to forget the existence of another--that cruel malignancy, which, in embryo, may be seen any time at the monkey-house in the Zoo. In its more developed human form it jostles at our elbows every day.