“No, I don’t,” Anna answered, mildly. “I am almost as anxious as yourselves for him to marry rich, for I know you need money sadly, and my income is not so large as for your sakes I wish it was, but poverty and love are better than riches and hatred, and I have always felt a strange interest in that young girl, whom I know John loved, or he would never have written to see how we would bear his taking a portionless bride.”
“I told him plainly how I would bear it. She should never cross my threshold,” and the face of Mrs. Richards, the mother, was highly indicative of the feeling she entertained for the young, penniless girl, whom it would seem John Richards M. D., had thought to marry.
“I trust he is over that fancy,” she continued, “and ready to thank me for the strong letter I wrote him.”
“Yes, but the girl,” and Anna leaned her white cheek in her whiter hand. “None of us know the harm his leaving her may have done. Don’t you remember he wrote how much she loved him—how gentle and confiding her nature was, how to leave her then might prove her ruin?”
“Our little Anna is growing very eloquent upon the subject of sewing girls,” Miss Asenath said, rather scornfully, and Anna rejoined,
“I am not sure she was a sewing girl. He spoke of her as a school girl.”
“But it is most likely he did that to mislead us,” said the mother. “The only boarding school he knows anything about is the one where Lottie was. He often visited her, but I’ve questioned her closely, and she cannot think of a single young lady whom he fancied more than another. All were in love with him, she said, herself included. If he were not her uncle by marriage I should not object to Lottie as a daughter,” was the next remark, whereupon there ensued a conversation touching the merits and demerits of a certain Lottie Gardner, whose father had taken for a second wife Miss Laura Richards.
During this discussion of Lottie, Anna had sat listlessly looking up and down the columns of an old Herald which Dick, Eudora’s pet dog, had ferreted out from the table and deposited at her feet. She evidently was not thinking of Lottie, nor yet of the advertisements, until one struck her notice as being very singular from the fact that a name was appended to it, a thing she had never seen before. Holding it a little more to the light and bending forward she said, “Possibly this is the very person I want—one who will be either a companion or a waiting-maid, only the child might be an objection, though I do love the little things. Just listen,” and Anna read as follows:
“Wanted—by an unfortunate young married woman, with a child a few months old, a situation in a private family either as governess, seamstress, or lady’s maid. Country preferred. Address ——”
Anna was about to say whom, when a violent ringing of the bell and a heavy stamping of feet on the steps with out announced an arrival, and the next moment a tall, handsome young man, exceedingly Frenchified in his appearance, entered the room, and was soon in the arms of his mother, who, kissing his bearded cheek, welcomed him as her son.