“I’ll keep it,” he said. “It is all I have left of her except the lock of hair and the peas she gave to me. What a fool I was in those days,” and he laughed as he recalled the morning when Milly threw him the pod which he had not seen in a year.
But he brought it out now, and laughed again when he saw how hard and shriveled were both the peas.
“Stony and hard like her. I believe I’ll throw them away and end the tomfoolery,” he said.
But he put them back in the box, which he called a little grave, and took up next the curl of tangled hair, comparing its color in his mind with Mrs. Thornton’s hair, which, from its peculiar, mottled appearance, had attracted his notice. How had she changed it, he wondered, and then remembering to have heard of dyes, to which silly, fashionable women sometimes resorted, he was sure that he hated her, and putting the box away went to bed with that thought uppermost in his mind, but with Milly’s handkerchief folded under his pillow.
CHAPTER XI.
WHAT FOLLOWED.
When Hugh awoke the next morning it was with a confused idea that something had gone out of his life and left it a blank, and he asked himself what it was and why he was feeling so badly. But memory soon brought back a recollection of the secret he held and would hold to the end, for he had no intention of betraying Mildred or charging her with deception, if, indeed, he ever spoke to her again. He had no desire to do so, he thought, and then it came to him suddenly that there was to be a grand party at Thornton Park that night, and that he had ordered a dress suit for the occasion.
“But I shall not go,” he said to himself, as he made his hurried toilet. “I could not bear to see Milly tricked out in the gewgaws and jewels for which she sold herself.”
And firm in this resolution, he went about his usual duties in his office, clinching his fist and setting his teeth when several times during the day he heard Tom Leach talking eagerly of the party, which he expected to enjoy so much. Tom did not ask if Hugh was going, expecting it as a matter of course, and Hugh kept his own counsel, and was silent and moody and even cross for him, and at about four o’clock sat down to write his regret. Then, greatly to his surprise, he found how much he really wanted to see Mildred once more and study her in the new character she had assumed.
“I shall not talk with her and I don’t know that I shall touch her hand, but I am half inclined to go,” he thought, and tearing up his regret, he decided to wait awhile and see; and as a result of waiting and seeing, nine o’clock found him walking up the broad avenue to the house, which was ablaze with light from attic to basement, and filled with guests, who crowded the parlors and halls and stairways, so that it was some little time before he could fight his way to the dressing-room, which was full of young men and old men in high collars, low vests and swallow-tails, many of them very red in the face and out of breath with their frantic efforts to fit gloves a size too small to hands unused to them, for fashionable parties like this were very rare in Rocky Point.
Mildred had not wished it, as she shrank from society rather than courted it, but Gerard and Alice were anxious for it, and Mr. Thornton willing, and under the supervision of his children cards were sent to so many that the proud man grew hot and cold by turns as he thought of having his sacred precincts invaded by Tom, Dick and Harry, and the rest of them, as he designated the class of people whom he neither knew, nor cared to know. But Alice and Gerard knew them, and they were all there, Tom and Bessie with the rest, Tom by far the handsomest young man of all the young men, and the one most at his ease, while Bessie, in her pretty muslin dress, with only flowers for ornament, would have been the belle of the evening, but for the hostess, whose brilliant beauty, heightened by the appliances of dress, which so well became her fine figure, dazzled every one as she stood by her husband’s side in her gown of creamy satin and lace, with diamonds flashing on her white neck and arms and gleaming in her hair. How queenly she was, with no trace of the storm which had swept over her the previous night, and Hugh, when he descended the stairs and first caught sight of her, stopped a few moments, and leaning against the railing, watched her receiving her guests with a smile on her lips and a look in her eyes which he remembered now so well, and wondered he had not recognized before. And as he looked there came up before him another Milly than this one with the jewels and satin and lace, a Milly with tangled hair and calico frock and gingham apron, shelling her peas in the doorway and predicting that she would some day be the mistress of Thornton Park. She was there now, and no grand duchess born to the purple could have filled the position better.