“Yes, I guess she is; the beautifullest woman I ever saw. Why, she looked like a queen the morning she was married, and more like his daughter than his wife.”
“Have you seen her often? Were you near her in church?” I asked in some surprise, unable to reconcile her statement of the new Mrs. Schuyler’s beauty, with a rumor which had reached me in a roundabout way concerning her age and personal appearance.
“Yes, I was very near her in church and threw her some flowers, and I saw her many times at Oakwood, in the grounds where she walked in her pretty white dresses. I did not speak to her, you know. I was some ways off, but I could see how handsome she was, and everybody said so, too.”
Gertie’s reply puzzled me, for I knew that the Schuyler Hill ladies were expecting something dreadful in the bride and were preparing themselves accordingly, while Gertie’s story seemed to contradict the entire thing. But all I had to do was to wait and see for myself, so I asked no more questions, and as the afternoon was drawing to a close, we left the cemetery and took a path homeward, which led near to the great house on the hill. The ladies were playing croquet on the lawn, and Gertie pulled my dress and whispered:
“See, there they are, four ladies; which are the sisters, and who are the others?”
I pointed out Julia and Emma Schuyler, and told her the lady in the black dress and scarlet shawl was Miss Rossiter, Godfrey’s aunt, and that the light-haired girl, with her hair put up so high, was Miss Alice Creighton from New York, who spent a great deal of time at Schuyler Hill, as the colonel was her guardian.
“Oh, how I like to play croquet! Why, if I can only get a ball, I can go clear round the ground the first time. Do you think they would ask us to join them if we went nearer?” she said; and I replied that I hardly thought they would care to give up that game for the sake of taking us in, while to myself I wondered at her temerity in proposing such a thing.
I did not know her then as well as I did afterward, for though she could tell Godfrey Schuyler that he must not talk to her because she was poor, in her heart she was a born aristocrat, and felt no distinction except the accident of wealth between herself and people like the Schuylers. She never forgot that her mother was a lady, and though she had but forty pounds a year and her auntie was a seamstress, she felt no inferiority to any one, and expected kindness and attention from all. It was a little singular that of the four ladies in the lawn she should have singled out Alice Creighton as the subject for remark, and not very complimentary remarks either.
“Why does she wear her hair so high?” she asked, and when I explained that it was the fashion, she answered: “But it is very ugly, and makes her look so queer. Will Mr. Godfrey like that? He said mine was pretty in my neck;” and taking off her white cape sun-bonnet she let her bright, wavy hair fall in masses around her face and down her back.
“You are a little girl,” I said, “and Miss Creighton is seventeen, and engaged, I guess.”