EXTRACT FROM GODFREY’S JOURNAL.
“What a regal creature Edith is! and I do believe father thinks so too, but that would be an awful match for her. Jule would scratch her eyes out, and if ever I should marry Alice, which I never shall, but if I do, and bring her home to Schuyler Hill, wouldn’t I have lively times between step-mother and wife; but that is too absurd to consider for a moment. I wish she was younger or that I was older. Let me see,—’most eighteen from ’most twenty-eight, leaves ten. No, that will never do. A man may not marry his grandmother, much less a boy, as Jule calls me in her letter, giving me all sorts of advice, and hoping I will overcome that habit of wriggling,—meaning the way I have of shaking down my pants. As if I knew when I did it. Alice’s letter was a very good one, only why need she call me “Dear Godfrey” when I’m not her Dear Godfrey, and never shall be. Why, she looks older than Miss Lyle herself in that picture, with her hair stuck on the top of her head like a heathen Chinee. I believe I’ll tear the picture up. Miss Lyle did not like it, neither do I, and I will not have it in my possession. I wonder if Miss Lyle would give me hers. I mean to ask her to-morrow.”
He did ask her and received no for his answer, and then tore up Alice’s photograph, and packed his valise, and with his father set off for Paris the following day.
CHAPTER XII.
EDITH AND HER MOTHER.
“And you refused him?”
“Yes, mother, I refused him.”
“Are you crazy, child?”
“Not as crazy as I should be to accept him.”
Edith was sitting with her mother in the little house in Caledonia Street, when the above conversation took place. It was the day of Col. Schuyler’s departure for Paris, and she had driven into town, with permission to stay to tea if she liked. She had not intended to tell her mother what had been said to her by the colonel, but when questioned of him something in her manner excited Mrs. Barrett’s suspicion, and in her usual forcible way she wrung from her daughter the fact that Schuyler Hill had been offered to her and refused. To say that Mrs. Barrett was angry would feebly express her emotions. In all her dreams for Edith she had never hoped for anything quite equal to an alliance with Col. Schuyler, and now that she had wilfully thrown the chance away she was exceedingly indignant, and expressed her disapprobation in terms so harsh and bitter that Edith, who seldom felt equal to a contest with her mother’s fierce, strong will, roused herself at last and answered back: