"Norah," she said, looking suddenly up with a flitting blush, "what do you say to a trip to Washington next week, after this snow-storm is quite cleared away—do you think it would be safe for little Paul?"
"Hurt him! I think not. He is so strong and healthy; but has the Senator written for you to come on?" asked Norah, eagerly.
"No"—her brow clouded, and that warm flush hung out its signal-flag on her cheek again—"he has not. I do not mean for him to know anything about it. I shall stay but a day or two, only taking you and baby; then we shall return as quietly as we went, and no one be the wiser; and now, Norah, baby is falling asleep, take him to his nursery, and bring me the Washington papers, if they have come in yet."
"They came hours ago; it is eleven o'clock, Mrs. Winans, and you have taken no breakfast yet. Won't you have it sent up here to you?" said the kind-hearted nurse, solicitously.
"Have I not taken breakfast? I believe I do not want any; I have been thinking so intently I have lost my appetite, and was actually forgetting that I had not breakfasted," then noting the pained look that shaded Norah's face, "Oh, well, you may bring me a glass of milk with the papers."
But Norah, after depositing her sleeping burden in his crib in the nursery, brought with the papers a waiter holding a cup of warm cocoa, a broiled partridge, stewed oysters, warm muffins and fresh butter, the specified glass of milk crowning all. Depositing the waiter on a little marble table, she wheeled up a comfortable chair and installed Mrs. Winans therein.
"You are to take your breakfast first," she said, with the authority of a privileged domestic, "then you can read the papers."
She laid them on a stand by the side of her mistress and softly withdrew to the nursery. And lifting the glass of milk to her lips with one hand, Grace took up the Washington Chronicle with the other and ran her eyes hastily over the columns, devouring the bits of Congressional news.
As she read her cheek glowed, her pearly teeth showed themselves in a smile half-pleased, half-sorrowful. Praise of her husband could not but be dear to her, but her pride in him was tempered by the thought that he cared not that she—his wife—should be witness of and sharer in his triumphs.
And turning away from the record of his brilliant speech on Southern affairs, she glanced indolently down the column of society news, recognizing among the names of women who stood high in the social scale many who had been among her most intimate friends the preceding winter. She had been the queen of them all then, reigning by right of her beauty and intellect no less than by her wealth and high position—best of all, queen of her husband's heart—and as the thought of all that she had been "came o'er the memory of her doom," the dethroned queen sprang from her chair and paced the floor again, burning with passionate resentment, stirred to her soul's deepest depths with the bitter leaven of scorn, not less a queen to-day though despoiled of her kingdom.