"The girl has a sweet, flexible voice. I wonder if she is going to surprise me, every now and then, with some new accomplishment! Maybe I have an embryo prima-donna in my employ!" she muttered, with a scornful smile.
Her surprise was not diminished when she saw the happy girl with her bright and animated manners and the new love-light shining on her face, making it almost dazzling in its intensified loveliness.
"What has come over you, Ruth?" Mrs. Montague inquired, regarding her curiously. "One would almost imagine you were going to the ball yourself to-night, you appear to be so happy and elated."
"I believe there must be something unusually exhilarating in the atmosphere," Mona replied, a gleeful little laugh rippling over her smiling lips, although she blushed beneath the woman's searching look. "Don't you think that excitement is sometimes infectious?—and surely everybody has been active and gay for days. I like to see people happy, and then the morning is perfectly lovely."
Truly the world was all couleur de rose to her since love's elixir had given a new impetus to her heart-pulses!
Mrs. Montague frowned slightly, for somehow the girl's unusual mood annoyed her.
She could not forget her exceeding loveliness on Saturday evening, when she had been arrayed in the festal robe which she herself was to wear at the ball, and the memory of it nettled her.
Perhaps, she thought, Ruth remembered it also, and was secretly exulting over the fact of her own beauty. Exceedingly vain herself, she was quick to suspect vanity in others, and this thought only increased her irritation.
"I'd give a great deal if she wasn't so pretty; and—and that style of beauty always annoys me," she said to herself, with a feeling of angry impatience.
And giving a sudden twitch to a delicate ruffle, which she had begun to arrange upon the corsage of a dress, to show Mona how she wanted it, she made a great rugged tear in the filmy fabric, thus completely ruining the frill.