“But I am not at the tailor shop now, Miss Montague.”
“Indeed? Have they discharged you, then?” insolently.
“Oh, no, miss; I left of my own accord. I’m getting to be an old woman now, and must rest for the balance of my life.”
Rosalind looked more closely, and noted a more prosperous air about Berry’s mother than she had ever seen before.
“I do not understand how you expect to live without work,” she said sharply.
“It does seem strange to you, doesn’t it now, Miss Montague, seeing how I have been working and toiling here all my life? My son-in-law, out of his good heart, has sent me a present of a thousand dollars to take my ease on, and says there’s more to come when I have spent it all.”
“So then you will not come to sew?” Rosalind exclaimed sneeringly.
“No, Miss Montague. I’d rather not, thank you all the same for giving me the chance if I needed it, but Berry wrote I mustn’t work any more.”
“I’ll go, then,” Rosalind cried, with an angry flirt of her skirts that tumbled the picture off the easel and splintered the glass over it; while with a smothered, malicious laugh at what she had done through pure spitefulness, she swept from the house, leaving the old woman busy gathering up the fragments.
“I’m cross; I don’t care to drive to-day. We will go back home,” she said to Adrian Vance sharply.