“Yes, I will employ her,” declared Rosalind, “if only to have the triumph of seeing Charley Bonair’s poor old mother-in-law toiling for me. Ha, ha! what a spectacle!” She ended with a harsh, grating laugh of smothered rage.
When she drove out with Adrian Vance that afternoon, she got him to wait at the cottage door, in the automobile, while she went to see Mrs. Vining.
The woman’s youngest son, a boy of sixteen, met her at the cottage door, and led her into the small, neat sitting room, saying he would call his mother.
He disappeared, and Rosalind looked, superciliously, about the small apartment with its dingy furnishings, muttering:
“I would rather die than be poor and shabby. I declare I don’t see how very poor folks endure such an existence. Ah, what——” the sentence ended abruptly, and getting up with a swish of trailing silk and flutter of rich laces, she swept across the room to a new easel standing in a corner with a good-sized picture upon it, representing a group of two—a picturesque group of two lovers, a handsome man, a lovely white-gowned girl, standing, hand in hand, amid tropical shrubbery.
Rosalind gazed with idle curiosity a moment, then her eyes flashed, and a keen, bitter pain stabbed her jealous heart like the point of a dagger.
The picture was a large, framed photograph of Charley Bonair and Berry that they had sent to Mrs. Vining months before.
The beauty and the happiness of the handsome pair struck Rosalind’s heart with bitterness, but while she gazed the mother’s voice said, just behind her:
“Ah, Miss Montague, you’re admiring the picture of my little girl and her husband. It’s the image of Berry, bless her dear heart, don’t you think so, miss? She sent it to me a while ago, and oh, how glad I am the dear girl is happily married! But I beg pardon, can I do anything for you, Miss Montague?”
“I am to be married soon, you know, Mrs. Vining, to Senator Bonair, and some of my simpler things are being done at home by seamstresses. Mamma sent me to ask if you will come and help finish up, next week? She will pay you more than you can earn at the tailor shop.”