“Yes; but several removes from Bob, though. I fancied that his father married beneath him, for Bob never says a word about his friends on the maternal side. He went to see them, though, up in Scotland somewhere, and when he came to Oakwood he was awful blue and silent for days, and doubtful about coming to America, but he got over that. He wants to paint some of our American views, and surely he could not select a better point on the Hudson than Hampstead. I hope he will come soon. I’m lost without him.”
What Godfrey liked he liked heartily, and he went on lauding Robert Macpherson until his hearers grew tired of it and asked him to talk of something else.
Meantime Edith had gone to her room, where her husband left her while he looked over the letters and documents which had been accumulating for a week or more. As he went out Norah came in to attend her mistress.
“Get me my dressing-gown and brushes, and then you can go. I shall not need you any more. I am going to sit up awhile,” Edith said; and after her maid was gone she arose, and walking to the long mirror, stood looking at the image it revealed of a beautiful lady, clad in heavy silk, with jewels on neck and arms and in her shining hair.
And then her thoughts went backward to the time, years before, when a strange vision had come to her, of herself as she was now clad in costly array, and the mistress of Schuyler Hill. Then her heart had been breaking with a sense of desolation and dread; now it was swelling with pride and happiness, even though that happiness was mingled with regret when she remembered the past and the dead youth whose grave was just across the lawn where the monument was showing so plainly in the moonlight.
And yet she was very happy, and had been so ever since her feet touched the soil of America. She had seen everything in New York which was worth seeing at that season of the year,—had driven with her husband and with Godfrey and with Robert Macpherson in the park, and had been pointed out as the handsomest woman there. She had shopped at Arnold’s and Stewart’s and Tiffany’s, and lunched at Delmonico’s, and dined at Mr. Calvert’s, and stood on the very spot her feet had touched that day when Abelard was made her husband. But no one had suspected her in the least, and Mrs. Calvert, who was a good-natured little woman, had accepted her in good faith as an entire stranger to America and its ways, and patronized her accordingly.
And it was just here that Edith’s conscience gave her a great deal of trouble. When the Calverts and her husband and Godfrey talked to her of America as of a place wholly new to her, she felt herself a miserable impostor, and there was at first a dull pain in her heart as she thought of living on and on with this hidden secret, as she had made up her mind to do.
But gradually this feeling began to give way, and when at last she left New York and started for her country home, she was very happy, even though there was underlying her happiness a feeling of unrest, a feverish desire to see the cottage once more and the grave on the hill, where the evergreens were growing.
How different was this arrival at Hampstead from what the first had been. Then Abelard had stood upon the platform in his working dress, for he had not had time to change it, and with her mother she had walked up the long hill and round through Mountain Avenue to the cottage which was to be their home. Now in place of Abelard, a liveried coachman stood waiting for her, while another servant in livery handed her to the carriage, and both bowed respectfully when their master said:
“The air is so pure and the day so fine I think we will take the longest route home, and drive through Mountain Avenue.”