"Dithy, think of it! It makes my brain swim, and stranger things have happened. My twentieth birthday comes next week, and ma gives a large party, and Lady H. and Sir V. are coming. I am to wear a pink silk with trimmings of real point, and pa sent home a set of pearls from Tiffany's yesterday, for which he gave $1,000. If the rose silk and pearls fail to finish him, then there is another project on the carpet. It is this, Lady H. and Sir V. go home the first week of May, and we are going with them in the same ship. I say we—pa, ma, Charley, and me. Won't it be lovely? If you were coming, you might write a book about our haps and mishaps. I think they will equal the 'Dodd Family Abroad.' Seriously, though, Edith dear, I wish you were coming with us. It's a burning shame that you should be buried alive down in that poky Sandypoint, with your cleverness, and your accomplishments, and good looks, and everything. If I marry the baronet, Dith, I shall take you with me to England, and you shall live happy forever after.
"I set out to tell you of the De Rooyter ball, and see how I run on. All New York was there—the crush was awful, the music excellent, the supper—heavenly! Sir Victor likes us Americans so much; but then who could help liking us? Oh, it has been a charming winter—parties somewhere every night. Nilsson singing for us, some sleighing, and skating no end. I have had the loveliest skating costume, of violet velvet, satin and ermine—words can't do it justice.
"Hark! A clock down-stairs strikes five, and, 'Kathleen Mavourneen, the grey dawn is breaking' over the deserted city streets. As Lady Macbeth says, 'To bed—to bed!' With endless love, and endless kisses, ever thine own.
"BEATRIX."
She finished the letter—it dropped upon her lap, and her large, dark eyes looked blankly out over the cold, gray, rain-beaten sea. This was the life she longed for, prayed for, dreamed of, the life for which she would have sold half the years of her life. The balls, the operas, the rose silks and pearls, the booths and merry-go rounds of Vanity Fair. She thirsted for them as the blind thirst for sight. She longed for the "halls of dazzling light," the dainty dishes, the violet velvet and ermine, with a longing no words can paint. She had youth and beauty; she would have suited the life as the life suited her. Nature had made her for it, and Fate had planted her here in the dreariest of all dreary sea-coast towns.
The rain beat upon her uncovered head, the cold wind blew in her face—she felt neither. Her heart was full of tumult, revolt, bitterness untold.
Beatrix Stuart's father had been her dead mother's cousin. Why was Beatrix chosen among the elect of Mammon, and Edith left to drag out "life among the lowly?" She sat here while the moments wore on, the letter crushed in her lap, her lips set in a line of dull pain. The glory of the world, the flesh-pots of Egypt, the purple and fine linen of life, her heart craved with an exceeding great longing, and all life had given her was hideous poverty, going errands in shabby hats, and her stepmother's rubbers, through rain and mud, and being waited upon by such men as Sam Doolittle. She looked with eyes full of passionate despair at the dark, stormy sea.
"If I only had courage," she said, between her set teeth, "to jump in there and make an end of it. I will some day—or I'll run away. I don't much care what becomes of me. Nothing can be worse than this sort of life—nothing."
She looked dangerous as she thought it—dangerous to herself and others, and ready for any desperate deed. So absorbed was she in her own gloomy thoughts, as she sat there, that she never heard a footstep descending the rocky path behind her. Suddenly two gloved hands were clasped over her eyes, and a mellow, masculine voice, sang a verse of an appropriate song:
"'Break, break, break,
On thy cold grey stones, oh sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.'