"Yes, child," he answered, "it is all yours to do with as you please."
So she sent ten pounds to Jack, and wrote:
"I return the money you were so good as to loan mother. Ten pounds she said it was. It was very kind in you to let her have it, and I know you meant it well. You could not mean otherwise; but please, Mr. Trevellian, for my sake don't do it again.
"Yours truly,
"BESSIE McPHERSON."
This done, Bessie paid the butcher and the baker and the grocer, and a part of what they were owing Anthony and Dorothy, and bought herself a pair of shoes, and then religiously put by what was left to buy the medicines and dainties, the beef tea and wine and jellies and fruit, which were to nurse her father back to health physically and mentally. But it would take more than fruit or jelly to repair a constitution never strong and now greatly weakened by disease. Every day Archie grew weaker, while Bessie watched over and tended him with anguish in her heart and a terrible shrinking from the future when he would be gone forever. From Neil she heard often, but his letters did not do her much good they were so full of regret for the poverty which was keeping her from him and would keep her indefinitely for aught he knew. From her mother she seldom heard. That frivolous butterfly was too busy and gay to give much time or thought to her dying husband and overburdened child. She was still at Nice and still devoted to her American friends, the Rossiter-Brownes, as they called themselves, to the great amusement of their neighbors, who had known them when they were plain Mr. and Mrs. Isaac R. Brown, of Massachusetts, or, as they were familiarly called, Miss Brown and Ike. But they were rich people now; a turn in the wheel had made Ike a millionaire and transformed him into Mr. Rossiter-Browne, and with his wife and his two children, Augusta and Allen, he was doing Europe on a grand scale, and Mrs. Rossiter-Browne, an ambitious but well-meaning woman, had taken a violent fancy to Daisy, and had even invited her to go home with her in June, offering to defray all her expenses out and back if she would do so.
"And I half made up my mind to go," Daisy wrote to Bessie in May. "I have often wished to see America, and shall never have a better chance than this. Though not the most refined people in the world, the Rossiter-Brownes are very nice and very kind to me. Lady June, I dare say, would call them vulgar and second-class, and I am inclined to think they are what their own countrymen call shoddy. They have not always been rich as they are now. Indeed, Mrs. Rossiter-Browne makes no secret of the fact that she was once poor and did her own washing, which is very commendable in her, I am sure. By some means or other—either oil, or pork, or the war—they have made a fortune and have come abroad to spend it in a most princely manner. Mrs. Rossiter-Browne is good-looking, and wears the finest diamonds at Nice, if I except some of the Russian ladies, but her grammar is dreadful, her style of dress very conspicuous, and her voice loud and coarse. Augusta, the daughter, is twenty, and much better educated than her mother. She is rather pretty and stylish, but indolent and proud. Allen, the son, is twenty-two, tall, light-haired, good-natured, and dandified, kisses his mother night and morning, calls her ma and his father pa, and his sister sis; drives fast horses, wears an eye-glass, carries a cane, and affects the English drawl. Pere Rossiter-Browne is a little dapper man, with a face like a squirrel. At breakfast, which is served in their parlor, he eats with his knife, and pours his tea into his saucer in spite of Augusta's disgust and his wife's open protestations.
"'Now, Angeline, you shet up with your folderol,' he will say, with the most imperturbable good humor. 'At table dote I can behave with the best of 'em, but in my own room I'm goin' to be comfortable and take things easy like, and if I want to cool my tea in my sasser I shall. Miss McPherson don't think no less of me for that, you bet.'
"They have given me a standing invitation to breakfast with them when I like.
"'It don't cost no more for five than for four,' Mr. Rossiter-Browne says, and as juicy beefsteaks and mutton chops and real cream have a better relish than rolls and tea, I accept their hospitality in this as in many other things.