“Ah, how cruel it is to have not a friend on earth! To get such advice from you, who ought to fill the place of my poor, dead mother!” sobbed Daisie, heartbrokenly; but the old woman, who could be very hard and coarse when she chose, retorted sharply:
“Your poor mother would be alive now if she hadn’t married a poor man, and broken her heart because her parents disinherited her and refused ever to see her again. She was as pretty as you, and had her pick of lovers; but she fell in love with that poor artist, Vivian Bell, my husband’s brother. And what came of it? You know their struggles, for they died one after another only two years ago in New York, and left you, their only child, to fight the battle of life alone. So how you can throw away this splendid chance fairly beats my time.”
“But I am used to poverty, Aunt Alice, so it does not daunt me. And I am sorry you have arrayed yourself in the ranks of my persecutors, for it makes me feel so friendless. True, you are not really my aunt; but, as Uncle John’s wife, I have loved you just the same, and now”—sobbingly—“you have turned against me, and I must go away alone and unpitied, unless by my true little friend Annette.”
She dragged herself wearily upstairs, and, throwing off, with a shudder of disgust, her white gown, donned a loose robe, and sat down beside the window to keep a vigil that was sad and strange for a new-made bride.
How long she sat there she never knew, so confused were her thoughts; but it could not have been more than an hour, when she heard carriage wheels grating on the stillness of the street, then pausing before the house, and a man sprang out and came into the porch, ringing a furious peal on the doorbell.
Daisie put her head out of the window, exclaiming nervously:
“What is wanted?”
At the same moment she recognized the young minister, and heard him say:
“Your husband is dying—they have sent for you to come!”