It seemed to her simple mind that Mrs. Beresford had been won over already.
“She told me I was pretty—that she was looking at me as if I had been a picture; she can not be angry with her son for loving me,” she murmured, sagely, and she decided that if he should write her a letter from abroad she would answer it at once, telling him all that had happened since their parting and of her pleasant rencontre with his charming mother.
Dimpling with happy smiles, the fragment of a love-song on her rosy lips, Floy climbed the uncarpeted stairs to her own poor little den, away up under the eaves in the fourth story, where a minute later she was followed by her landlady, pudgy Mrs. Horton.
The woman carried in her hand a beautiful bunch of roses and a letter.
“These came for you awhile ago, Miss Fane,” she said, blandly.
“From whom?” exclaimed Floy, in surprise.
“Some of your beaus, I suppose. Better read the letter and see,” the woman returned good-naturedly.
Floy tore it open with nervous fingers, and read these words written in an elegant masculine hand:
“Dear little Floy—I can not rest under the ban of your anger.
“We used to be such good friends before that night at Suicide Place that I think you might forgive my folly when I was so drunk I did not realize what I was doing—nothing worse, after all, than trying to steal a kiss from the sweetest lips in the world. Many a pretty girl has forgiven a little fault like that in an adoring lover.