“Cecil?” Molly queried, in surprise, and Phebe answered:
“He asked me how much money it would take to pay me to keep silent over all the secrets I had found out here. It was hard to bear, Mrs. Laurens, but I was patient. I would not anger him, for I wanted to come back to you some time. So I told him I needed no bribe to keep the secrets of my unhappy young mistress—that my love for her was enough.”
“Dear, good Phebe!” cried Molly, lovingly, and then she made the woman promise not to go too far away, and to send her an address to which to write when she should have coaxed Cecil to let her come back.
Phebe promised to give her address to Miss Madelon Trueheart.
“That will be best, dear, for if I sent it to The Acacias who knows but that the new maid might keep it from you?” she said.
Molly did not like the crafty-looking Frenchwoman who took the place of her good Phebe, whom Cecil had hired for her in New York, when they were starting on their wedding-trip.
But Florine, as she called herself, gave her new mistress no cause for offense. She was quiet, polite, attentive to Molly’s lightest wants, and the most tasteful and skillful of maids. Her intense sympathy was irksome for she persisted in declaring that madame looked too ill to leave her room.
In fact Molly made no effort at mingling with the family for several days after that first time. The cruel rebuff she had received chilled and disheartened her. She shrank sensitively from another one, and so assented passively to Florine’s advice to keep to her room.
During those days of tiresome seclusion she busied herself at intervals as her strength would permit in writing a long letter to Doctor Charley—a letter that required many postage stamps for mailing, for Molly wrote down the whole story of her going to Ferndale, and all that had followed upon that visit. She wrote eagerly, hopefully, for she believed that her brother-in-law would force Cecil to read this explanation from his unhappy girl-wife.