“Generally,” he said in his metallic, unmodulated voice. “The man who would cast away health, usefulness, and fortune in his chagrin at not winning the hand of a shallow-pated, volatile flirt, must be both silly and susceptible.”
“Rosa Tazewell may have been shallow of heart, but she was not of pate,” answered Mr. Aylett, with a cold sneer. “She was a fair plotter, and not fickle of purpose when she had her desires upon a much-coveted object. Her marriage proved that. She meant to captivate Chilton before she had known him a month—yes, and to marry him, as she finally did. Her intermediate conquests were but the practice that was to perfect her in her profession. Does anybody know, by the way, if he has ever taken a second wife to his bereaved bosom?”
A brief silence, then Mrs. Aylett said, negligently, “I think not. Mrs. Trent, Rosa's sister, was expatiating to me a month since upon the beauty and accomplishments of his daughter, and she said nothing of a step-mother. Father and child live with a married sister of Mrs. Chilton, I believe.”
“I had not heard that Rosa left a child,” remarked Mabel, interested. “I understood that two died before the mother.”
“Only one—and that the younger. Miss Florence is now twelve years old, Mrs. Trent says. I saw her at church once, when she was visiting her grandmother and aunts. She is really passable—but very unlike her mother.”
Mabel did not join in the desultory talk that engaged the others until supper-time. There was a broken string in her heart, that jangled painfully when touched by an incautious hand.
“Twelve years old!” she was saying, inwardly. “My darling would have been thirteen, had she lived!”
And then flitted before her fancy a girlish form, with pure, loving eyes, and a voice melodious as a mocking-bird's. Warm arms were about her neck, and a round, soft cheek laid against hers—as no human arms and face would ever caress her—her, the childless, whose had been the hopes, fears, pains—never the recompence of maternity.
She had been to the graveyard that day—secretly, lest her husband should frown, Clara wonder, and Winston sneer at her love for and memory of that which had never existed, according to their rendering of the term. She had trimmed the wire-grass out of the little hollow, above which the mound had not been renewed since the day of her baby's burial, and, trusting to the infrequency of others' visits to the neglected enclosure, had laid a bunch of white rose-buds over the unmarked dust she accounted still a part of her heart, 'neath which it had lain so long. People said she had never been a mother; never had had a living child; had no hope of seeing it in heaven. God and she knew better.
“Clara, I wish you to attend Mrs. Tazewell's funeral this afternoon,” said Mr. Aylett at breakfast the next day but one after this. “There were invidious remarks made upon your non-appearance at her daughter's, and I do not choose that my family shall furnish food for neighborhood scandal.”