“That girl has done nothing but set everybody by the ears ever since she entered this house,” she burst forth, at length, quivering in every nerve with anger. “Lord Carrol in love with her! I cannot comprehend it, and I think it is scandalous for him to confess it, after the marked attention that he paid me at Long Branch.”
“I think so, too,” Mrs. Richards echoed, but rather faintly, for she knew how Josephine had almost been thrown at him, so to speak.
“Well, I am glad she is gone,” the excited girl continued. “I hope now that we shall be able to take some comfort. She bewitched papa with her pretty face, her music, and pretended love of study. She was an artful thing, making herself so conspicuous at school that even the newspapers took it up, and was so puffed up on account of it that her airs were insufferable. It is a mercy that Uncle Jacob lost his fortune before he came to us, or she would have been likely to wheedle him out of it.”
“She has been as sly as a fox,” commented Mrs. Richards, wrathfully, her ire against poor, unoffending Star waxing hotter and hotter, for she was as bitterly disappointed to lose his lordship as a son-in-law as Josephine was to lose him as a husband.
“I never heard anything like it. To think of his being engaged to her, and we never suspecting such a thing! I’ll bet,” the refined young lady continued, as a bright idea struck her, “that she went away to meet him last Saturday, and that was why she was rigged out so. That must be the secret of her insolence to me. She knew she was soon to become Lady Carrol, and she was trying how it would seem to lord it over me.”
“You forget, Josephine,” interposed her mother, “that she did not know anything about his title, and so you are all wrong in your surmises.”
“True,” she replied, somewhat crestfallen; “but when do you suppose he engaged himself to her?”
“I am sure I do not know—very recently, he said. I tried to make her tell me about it last night, but I couldn’t get a word out of her. One would have thought, by the way that she faced me, that she was already my lady somebody. But I reckon I fixed it so that she will not be at present. I made her think that his lordship had told the story in a way to make her appear as ridiculous as possible, and she has gone away, believing him to be as faithless as it is in the power of man to be;” and the hardhearted woman threw herself back in her chair with a sigh of satisfaction at the thought.
“It is a shame, anyhow. Everything has gone wrong, and I—I really was fond of him,” Josephine confessed, with a passion of tears.
Mrs. Richards’ face darkened. She never could tolerate anything which interfered with the desires and whims of her only child.