“Oh-h!” and Rex drew a long breath as Dorcas went on: “She has a lovely complexion, with brilliant color, perfect features, reddish-brown hair with glints of gold in it in the sunlight, and the handsomest eyes you ever saw,—large and bright and almost black at times when she is excited or pleased,—long lashes, and carries herself like a queen.”
“Oh-h!” Rex said again, knowing that Rose Arabella Jefferson had fallen from her pedestal of beauty and was really the Squint-Eye of whom he had thought so derisively. “Have you a photograph of her?” he asked, and Dorcas replied that she had and would show it to him if he liked.
They had now reached home, and, bringing out an old and well-filled album, Dorcas pointed to a photograph which Rex recognized as a facsimile of the one his aunt had insisted belonged to Miss Jefferson. He could not account for the peculiar sensations which swept over him and kept deepening in intensity as he looked at the face which attracted him more now than when he believed it that of Rose Arabella of Scotsburg.
“I wish you would let me have this. I am a regular photo-fiend,—have a stack of them at home, and would like mightily to add this to the lot,” he said, remembering that the one he had was defaced with Rose Arabella’s name.
But Dorcas declined. “Bertha would not like it,” she said, taking the album from him quickly, as if she read his thoughts and feared lest he would take the picture whether she were willing or not.
It was now time for Rex to go, if he would catch the next car for Worcester. After thanking Mr. Leighton and Dorcas for their hospitality and telling them to be sure and let him know whenever they came to New York, so that he might return their kindness, he bade them good-bye, with a feeling that although he had lost his fancy farm and fox-hunts, he had gained two valuable friends.
“They are about the nicest people I ever met,” he said, as he walked down the avenue. “Couldn’t have done more if I had been related. I ought to have told them to come straight to our house if they were ever in New York, and I would if it were mine. But Aunt Lucy wouldn’t like it. I wonder she didn’t tell me about the mistake in the photographs when I was on the ship. Maybe she didn’t think of it, I saw her so short a time. I remember, though, that she did say that Miss Leighton was rather too high and mighty, and, by George, I told her to sit down on her! I have made a mess of it; but I will write at once and go over sooner than I intended, for there is no telling what Mrs. Haynes may put my aunt up to do. I will not have that girl snubbed; and if I find them at it, I’ll——”
Here he gave an energetic flourish of his cane in the air to attract the conductor of the fast-coming car, and posterity will never know what he intended doing to his aunt and Mrs. Walker Haynes, if he found them snubbing that girl.
CHAPTER X.
AT AIX-LES-BAINS.
There was a stop of a few days at the Metropole in London, where Mrs. Hallam engaged a courier; there was another stop at the Grand in Paris, where a ladies’ maid was secured; and, thus equipped, Mrs. Hallam felt that she was indeed traveling en prince as she journeyed on to Aix, where Mrs. Walker Haynes met her at the station with a very handsome turnout, which was afterwards included in Mrs. Hallam’s bill.