“I cannot help feeling that if she had known all, your unfortunate entanglement would have been prevented,” Mrs. Churchill had written, and Edna commented sadly upon it:
“Yes, if I had known all, it would have been prevented; but it is not the money,—no, not the money; oh, Charlie, it is losing faith in you which hurts me the worst,” she moaned; then, resentment toward Mrs. Churchill got the better of her grief, and she said, “I’ll write to that woman, and tell her how mistaken she is.”
But only for an instant did she harbor such a thought. She would not wound Mrs. Churchill more deeply than she was already wounded. She would not write her at all, but to Roy, the heir,—Roy, the master of Leighton. The money came from him, and to him it should be returned, but not all at once. Fortunately for her Roy had sent a check payable to the bearer, and so she had no trouble in getting it cashed, and she decided that she must keep a part and pay it afterward. She had seen enough of the arrangements of the house to know that while there was not poverty, there was not a great plenty, and the owners could ill afford any additional expense.
“I may be sick for weeks,” she thought, “and I shall need money, and that twenty-five dollars in poor Charlie’s purse will not go very far. Oh, if only Aunt Jerusha was kind and forgiving; she has means; she could help me, if she would.”
At this point Mrs. Dana came in, bringing Edna’s supper, which she had tried to make as inviting as possible. But Edna could not eat; and, as the evening advanced, she grew so hot and feverish, and said such queer things, that Mrs. Dana sent for a physician, who managed by dint of bleeding, and blistering, and pills, to reduce his patient to a desirable state of weakness and keep her an invalid for two weeks or more; during which time Jack Heyford came many times to inquire after her, and bring her some little present which he thought might please her. Now it was an orange, or a bunch of grapes, and again a bouquet of flowers, which he left; and Edna liked these the best, and always cried over them, and thought of the little patch of flowers which, after a vast amount of pleading, she had been permitted to have for her own in Aunt Jerusha’s garden.
From Aunt Jerusha there had as yet come no reply to the message sent from Iona, and Edna began to feel that she was alone in the world, with herself to care for, unaided by any one. And with returning strength she felt equal to it. The blow which had taken Charlie from her and opened her eyes to Charlie’s defects, and showed her the estimation in which Charlie’s mother held her, seemed to have cut her loose from all that was giddy, and weak, and foolish in the Edna Browning of old. All the lightness and thoughtlessness of her young girlhood fled away and left her at seventeen a woman, self-reliant, and determined to fight her own way in the world independent of friend or foe.
And so her first act when able to do anything was to send the three hundred dollars back to Roy, with her note for the balance. How proud and strong she felt as she wrote that note, and then read it aloud to see how it sounded, and how she anticipated the time when she could pay it even to the utmost farthing. Once she thought to sell her watch and corals, the pretty gifts which Charlie had brought her just before she went with him to the house of the clergyman. He had come into the room after she was dressed, and stealing up behind her, had laid the chain across her neck, and with his arms around her had held the watch before her eyes and said:
“Look here, my darling! see what I have brought you.”
With boyish delight, he fastened it in her belt, and put the delicate pink jewels in her ears, and then bade her look at herself in the mirror to see the effect. That scene was as vividly in her mind as if it had occurred but yesterday; the happy, blushing face which the mirror reflected, and behind the young girl the tall young man whose lips touched her glowing cheeks as they whispered, “My beauty, my wife!”
She could not part with the bridal gift, so she kept a part of Roy’s money, and put the coral away as unsuited to her black dress, but she wore the watch, and its muffled ticking beneath her belt seemed like some friendly human heart throbbing against her own. This was before she received Aunt Jerusha’s effusion, which came to her the same day on which she sent her first letter to Roy, and which deserves a place in another chapter.