"From you, from you!"
"Well, to begin with Robert. He is taking him into his own office to learn the elements of business; and, though I dare say the dear boy will be more of a hinderance than assistance there at present, yet he is giving him a fair salary to start with, and is establishing him in the household of his head-clerk, a most respectable married man, where he will have all the comforts of home. Hal he is sending to Dr. Jellett's at St. Anne's, the best school in the county; and the girls, who are to live with you, are to have the advantages of first-class governesses and masters from Kelvick. And that is not all, Addie. See this piece of crumpled paper he thrust into my hands when he was going. It is a check for four hundred pounds—half of it to defray little debts and personal expenses I've been put to in our late stress, and to help me to start comfortably in my old home; the other half, Addie, to pay off old bills that we Lefroys have owed in the place for years—bills of your heartless father's, child—to coach-builders, wine-merchants, tobacconists, and others, of which he must have heard. And, oh, Addie, if you had seen how shamefaced and confused he was when he was trying to explain what he meant, you'd have thought he was the guilty party, not that other who—who broke my poor sister's heart before she was thirty, and abandoned you for a—"
Addie moved away quickly, and pressed her hot cheek to the cool pane of the window, and a sudden light breaks over her clouded sky, showing her a purpose, an aim with which she can ennoble and sweeten the years of coming life, make it of value to herself and to others.
"I will be a good wife to him," she whispers warmly. "I will try to pay him back the debt we owe him. I will brighten his home, and make it a happy one for him; I will never let him regret the day he married me and mine; I will be gentle, loving, companionable, always striving to please; I will curb my awful temper, put a check on my impetuous tongue. He will never guess, never suspect that I am not perfectly happy and contented, never know that I don't care for him as I might have cared for another—another not half as good, as noble, as generous, or as true as he is. Oh, why can't I—why can't I? How perverse and hard-hearted I am! But it won't matter; he'll never know—never! He'll never see me without a smile on my lips and cheerfulness in my eyes. I'll be a good wife to you, Tom, I will! Oh, help me, dear Heaven!"
CHAPTER IX.
The honeymoon is a fortnight old.
Mrs. Armstrong, in a pale silk of grayish blue, with ruffles of creamy lace at throat and wrists, and sparkling diamonds in her pretty pink ears, is languidly toying with a bunch of muscatel grapes, listening to the grateful plash of the waves breaking on the pebbly shore below.
The room in which she sits is a charming one, delicately yet luxuriously furnished, bright with hothouse flowers, with big French windows opening on to a canopied balcony overhanging the restless waters of St. George's Channel. Her husband is leaning back in his chair, sipping his post-prandial claret in blissful enjoyment.
"Headache all gone, Addie?" he asks, breaking a pleasant drowsy silence.