She was thinking of it to-day as she went out, and try as she would to rise above it, to feel that it was beneath her to notice anything so low and ignoble, yet it did sting with a keenness which was very hard to bear.
She almost began to long for the old days in the straw factory, and the independence of being her own mistress again even though she was obliged to live less luxuriously and work more laboriously.
She walked briskly on for a mile or two, past elegant residences, modern villas, and ancient halls, wholly unconscious of the more direful calamity which would befall her upon her return—of the fearful cloud about to burst above her head.
Isabel Coolidge had, so to speak, been dying of envy ever since the night of their attendance at the opera.
How did Miss Douglas happen to have such elegant apparel? Where did she get such wonderful jewels?
She did not believe her mother’s theory that she had been suddenly reduced from prosperity to poverty.
“Mamma, I tell you I don’t believe the girl came by them honestly,” she said one day.
“Why, child, you do not mean to say that you believe the girl is a thief?” exclaimed her mother, aghast.
“It is an ugly word, I know, but you said yourself that you considered her artful.”