"Well, whether your sister-in-law comes or not, I hope we are sure of your charming self?" said Ormonde.
"Unless I am obliged to parade my boys for their grand-uncle's inspection, I am sure to honor you."
"Of course everything must give away to that. I shall come and inquire what news soon, if I may?"
"Oh yes; come when you like."
"They are all ready, Mrs. Liddell," remarked her hostess.
Mr. Kirby offered his arm, which was accepted with a smile, and the little widow sailed away with the sense of riding on the crest of a wave. The ladies were packed into the carriage, the polite man out of livery whistled up a hansom for the two gentlemen, and the luncheon party was over.
It was a weary day to Mrs. Liddell—the dowager Mrs. Liddell, as society would have called her, only she had no dower. All she had inherited from her husband was the remnant of his debts, which she had been struggling for some years to pay off, and the care and maintenance of her boy and girl, on her own slender funds.
At present the horizon looked very dark, and she almost regretted for Katherine's sake that she had agreed to make a home for her son's widow and children. Yet what would have become of them without it?
Partly to rouse herself from her fruitless reflections, partly to relieve the house-maid, who had been doing some extra scrubbing, Mrs. Liddell took her little grandsons to Kensington Gardens, and when they had selected a place to play in she sat down with a book which she had brought in the vain hope of getting out of herself. But her sight was soon diverted from the page before her by the visions which came thronging from the thickly peopled past.
Her life had been a hard continuous fight with difficulty after the first few years of her wedded existence. She had seen her gay, pleasure-loving husband change under the iron grasp of untoward circumstances into a querulous, bitter, disappointed man, rewarding all her efforts to keep their heads above water by sarcastic complaints of her narrow stinginess, venting on her the remorseful consciousness, unacknowledged to himself, that his reverses were the result of his own reckless extravagance. Perhaps to her true heart the cruelest pain of all was the gradual dying out, or rather killing out, of the love she once bore him, the vanishing, one by one, of the illusions she cherished respecting him, till she saw the man as he really was, weak, unstable, self-indulgent, incapable of true manliness. Still she was patient with him to the last; and when she was relieved by friendly death from the charge of so wilful and ungrateful a burden—though things were easier, because hers was the sole authority—it was a constant strain to provide the education necessary for her boy. But that accomplished, she had a sweet interlude with her daughter in humble peace, and while she did her best to arm the child for the conflict of life, she avoided weakening herself by too much thought for her future. This spell of repose was broken by the necessity for sacrificing some of her small capital to set her son free from his embarrassments. Then came his death and her present experiment in house-keeping in order to give his widow and children a refuge.