The Tracy diamonds

by Mary Jane Holmes

“I don’t care if they are,” Fanny replied. “I think it is wicked, and told mother so. Don’t hold my head down. I am going to keep it up as long as I can. By and by I shall want to hang it so low,—oh, so low!”

“Not on account of a divorce,” Roy said, and Fanny rejoined, “That isn’t all; there is something a great deal worse. Father and mother went to Chicago and were very happy for a while,—then not so happy, and then not happy at all. Mother says she was more to blame than he. She liked attention and had it, and that made him jealous, and she used to tell him that she stooped when she married him, and taunted him with what I’m going to tell you about by and by. I was six months old and don’t remember it of course,—their quarrelling. I mean. He loved me, I know.”

“I am sure he did,” Roy interrupted her, giving her at the same time a squeeze which she did not seem to notice, she was so absorbed in her story.

“Once mother told him she wished he would go away and never come back, and he did go, and never came back. There was a boy living with them,—Jefferson Wilkes, in whom my father was interested and who had come to them from the Prospect House. Jeff, they called him, and he went with my father. After a while mother instituted proceedings for a divorce on the ground of desertion and incompatibility and psychological repulsion. Do you know what that is?”

“I know what it isn’t,” Roy said, kissing the face which began to look very pitiful as the story progressed.

“Mother knew where father was for a time and sent him a copy of the divorce. He replied, ‘I congratulate you on your freedom. You will not have any trouble in filling my place. You are young enough and handsome enough to have twenty-two more offers. Jeff and I are off for the mines in Montana. Tell the baby, when she is old enough to understand, that, bad as I was, I loved her. Mark Hilton.’

“I was ill with diphtheria when mother received the note,—so ill that the papers, when commenting on the divorce, said that I was dead. Six months later mother saw an account of a terrible accident in some mines in Montana. In the list of killed was my father’s name, but there was no mention of Jeff. Mother tried to learn the particulars, but could not, and after a while she came back to New York deserted, divorced and widowed, but still very beautiful. We lived with grandma, a proud old lady, who had never received my father. She is dead now and I do not remember her. Among mother’s friends was Judge Prescott, whom she used to know, and who, I think, wanted her before she married my father. When I was two and a half years old she married him and at his request I took his name. I was christened Frances, but he did not like that name and I was called Fanny to please him. I like it better than Frances, don’t you?”

Roy would have liked any name which belonged to her and said so, while she continued: “You were in Europe when all this happened and knew nothing about it as you are not much older than I am.”

“Two years,” Roy said, kissing her again, while she tried to disengage herself from him, but could not, for a lock of her hair had become frightfully entangled in a button of his coat.

It took some time to disentangle it and Fanny was obliged to lie quietly upon Roy’s arm, with her face upturned to him so temptingly that not to kiss it occasionally was impossible for one of his temperament.