"I should be glad to do it, particularly if it obliges you, Mrs. Delano," responded the merchant; "for I really think him a very worthy young man."
"Then consider it settled," she replied. "But let it be an affair between ourselves, if you please; and to him you may merely say that a friend of his former employer and benefactor wishes to assist him."
When Blumenthal informed Flora of this unexpected good-fortune, they of course suspected from whom it came; and they looked at each other, and blushed.
Mrs. Delano did not escape gossiping remarks. "How she has changed!" said Mrs. Ton to Mrs. Style. "She used to be the most fastidious of exclusives; and now she has adopted nobody knows whom, and one of Mr. Goldwin's clerks seems to be on the most familiar footing there. I should have no objection to invite the girl to my parties, for she is Mrs. Delano's adoptée, and she would really be an ornament to my rooms, besides being very convenient and an accomplished musician; but, of course, I don't wish my daughters to be introduced to that nobody of a clerk."
"She has taken up several of the Abolitionists too," rejoined Mrs. Style. "My husband looked into an anti-slavery meeting the other evening, partly out of curiosity to hear what Garrison had to say, and partly in hopes of obtaining some clew to a fugitive slave that one of his Southern friends had written to him about. And who should he see there, of all people in the world, but Mrs. Delano and her adoptée, escorted by that young clerk. Think of her, with her dove-colored silks and violet gloves, crowded and jostled by Dinah and Sambo! I expect the next thing we shall hear will be that she has given a negro party."
"In that case, I presume she will choose to perfume her embroidered handkerchiefs with musk, or pachouli, instead of her favorite breath of violets," responded Mrs. Ton.
And, smiling at their wit, the fashionable ladies parted, to quote it from each other as among the good things they had recently heard.
Only the faint echoes of such remarks reached Mrs. Delano; though she was made to feel, in many small ways, that she had become a black sheep in aristocratic circles. But these indications passed by her almost unnoticed, occupied as she was in earnestly striving to redeem the mistakes of the past by making the best possible use of the present.