"Pretty?" Charley responded, meditatively, as though the idea struck him for the first time. "Well, ye-e-es. In a cream-colored sort of way, Edith isn't bad-looking. It would be very nice of you now, Trix, to write her a letter, I think, seeing she saved my life, and nursed me, and is your second cousin, and everything."
Beatrix needed no urging. She was an impetuous, enthusiastic young woman of eighteen, fearfully and wonderfully addicted to correspondence. She sat down and wrote a long, gushing letter to her "cream-colored" cousin. Mrs. Stuart dropped her a line of thanks also, and Charley, of course, wrote, and there her adventure seemed to come to an end. Miss Stuart's letters were long and frequent. Mr. Stuart's rambling epistle alternately made her laugh and lose her temper, a daily loss with poor, discontented Edith. With the fine discrimination most men possess, he sent her, on her seventeenth birthday, a set of turquoise and pearls, which made her sallow complexion hideous, or, at least, as hideous as anything can make a pretty girl. That summer he ran down to Sandypoint for a fortnight's fishing, and an oasis came suddenly in the desert of Edith's life. She and Charley might quarrel still, and I am bound to say they did, on every possible occasion and on every possible point, but they were never satisfied a moment apart.
The fortnight ended, the fish were caught, he went back, and the dull days and the long nights, the cooking, darning, mending began again, and went on until madness would have been a relief. It was the old story of the Sleeping Beauty waiting for the prince to come, and wake her into life and love with his kiss. Only in this instance the prince had come and gone, and left Beauty, in the sulks, behind.
She was eighteen years old and sick of her life. And just when disgust and discontent were taking palpable form, and she was debating between a jump into Sandypoint bay and running off, came Charley, with his mother's letter. From that hour the story of Edith Darrell's life began.
CHAPTER III.
TRIXY'S PARTY.
Two weeks sufficed for Miss Darrell's preparations. A quantity of new linen, three new dresses, one hat, one spring sacque—that was all.
Mr. Darrell had consented—what was there he could have refused his darling? He had consented, hiding the bitter pang it cost him, deep in his own quiet heart. It was the loss of her mother over again; the tender passion and the present Mrs. Darrell were two facts perfectly incompatible.
Mrs. Darrell aided briskly in the preparation—to tell the truth, she was not sorry to be rid of her step-daughter, between whom and herself perpetual war raged. Edith as a worker was a failure; she went about the dingy house, in her dingy dresses, with the air of an out-at-elbows duchess. She snubbed the boarders, she boxed the juvenile Darrell's ears, she "sassed" the mistress of the house.
"It speaks volumes for your amiability, Dithy," Charley remarked, "the intense eagerness and delight, with which everybody in this establishment hails your departure. Four dirty little Darrells run about the passages with their war-whoop, 'Dithy's going—hooray! Now we'll have fun!' Your step-mother's sere and yellow visage beams with bliss; even the young gentlemen who are lodged and boarded, Greek-ed and Latin-ed here, wear faces of suppressed relief, that tells its own tale to the student of human nature. Your welfare must be unspeakably precious to them, Edie, when they bear their approaching bereavement so well."