“And afterward?”
Mrs. Button's color waned, And her voice sank, as the inquisition proceeded. “Dear Frederic's” death was not the subject she would have chosen of her free will to discuss with this man of steel and ice.
“I never visited them again. I could not—”
If she hoped to retain a semblance of composure, she must shift her ground.
“I returned to my father's house, which was, as you know, more remote from the borders of Maryland—”
“You kept up a correspondence, perhaps?” Winston interposed, overlooking her agitation as irrelevant to the matter under investigation.
“No! For many months I wrote no letters at all, and Mr. Chilton was never a punctual correspondent. The best of friends are apt to be dilatory in such respects, as they advance in life.”
“I gather, then, from what you have ADMITTED”—there was no actual stress upon the word, but it stood obnoxiously apart from the remainder of the sentence, to Mrs. Sutton's auriculars—“from what you have admitted, that for twenty years you have lost sight of this gentleman and his relatives, and that you might never have remembered the circumstance of their existence, had he not introduced himself to you at the Springs this summer.”
“You are mistaken, there!” corrected the widow, eagerly. “Rosa Tazewell introduced him to Mabel at the first 'hop' she—Mabel—attended there. He is very unassuming. He would never have forced himself upon my notice. I was struck by his appearance and resemblance to his father, and inquired of Mabel who he was. The recognition followed as a matter of course.”
“He was an acquaintance of Miss Tazewell—did you say?”