“Only a few friends, who I thought would be glad to meet Miss Lee—I beg pardon—your wife,” she hastily added as she saw the gathering frown upon his brow.
With a look in his eye which made her quail, he said, “Never make that mistake again, Angeline.” (And she never did!) “Rose is too much exhausted to appear in the parlor to-night,” he continued, as we entered my room—our room—the pleasant, tasteful apartment, which I once thought had been fitted up for Ada. “You ought to have had more tact than to invite company on the first night of my arrival—when you must have known how weary Rose would be. She don’t look like herself, so pale and way-worn,” he continued, himself removing my bonnet and tenderly stroking my aching head.
Nothing would please Ada better than to present me just as I was, pale and jaded, with dark rims beneath my eyes, induced by the severe headache from which I was really suffering. It would show her own charms to greater advantage, she thought, as she glanced at an opposite mirror and saw the contrast between us.
“Oh, Richard,” she said pleadingly, “pray don’t object to her going down, it wouldn’t be polite, and then they are all dying to see her.”
“Why then didn’t they, some of them, improve the opportunity when she was here before, and on show every day,” said Richard, moodily.
And Ada, forgetting herself, answered in a low tone, “Why, that’s plain enough, Mrs. Richard Delafield is a very different personage from Miss Lee, gov”——
“Ada!” sternly interposed my husband, “Never a remark like that in my presence.”
“Why, Uncle Dick,” said Ada, smothering her anger and winding her white arms around his neck, “how you frighten me. I didn’t mean anything, only I do want Rose to go down, so much, can’t you, dear?” and she turned towards me.
With her, I felt that it would hardly be polite to refuse, so I replied that “after a cup of tea and half an hour’s rest, I would try to do so.”
Supper was brought to our room, the servant almost touching her knees to the floor, so low was her obeisance to the “New Miss.” As I have once before remarked, my head was aching dreadfully, and as I looked at the soft, downy pillows which lay piled upon the snowy bed in the adjoining room, I thought how much rather I would throw myself among them, than join the gay company below. But it could not be, and with something like tears in the sound of my voice, I asked Richard to send up my trunks.