As Mrs. Werner drove home a cruel pain seemed tearing her heart to pieces. She had loved Dolly as child, as girl, as woman, with a love almost equalling that of a mother. She had longed for Dolly to be different, desired to see her grasp life with a firmer hand, and learn the lessons taught by experience as something more real than an idle jest. Dolly's frivolity had chafed her spirit even in the old Dassell days, but it had vexed her more since the time of her own marriage.
If she regarded the journey of existence as a serious affair, what right had Mr. Gerace's daughter to comport herself along the way as though she were but one of a picnic party, as though it were always first of May and fine weather with her?
Life should have been just as momentous a business at Homewood as at the West-End, where Henry Werner had set up his domestic gods; but Dolly could never be brought to see the iniquity of her own light-heartedness; and Mrs. Werner, who frequently found the hours and the days pass heavily enough in the ponderous atmosphere of respectability which her husband affected, could often have found it in her heart to box Dolly's ears for her levity of deportment and lightness of heart.
And now Dolly was serious enough, and yet Mrs. Werner felt dissatisfied—more than dissatisfied. She was in despair; the ideal Dolly she had always regarded as possible if not probable; but the frivolous, light-hearted, smiling Dolly she had foolishly desired to change, could never come back with her gay tones, with her laughing face, on this side Heaven.
Could Mrs. Werner at that moment have caught sight of the former Dolly, she would not have rebuked her for undue merriment.
She might have talked her light, innocent, mocking talk for the length of a summer's day without causing a shade to pass across her friend's face; she might have laughed till the welkin rang, and Mrs. Werner would not have marvelled how she could be so silly; she might have ridiculed all the decorous people within a circle of fifty miles had it pleased her, and Mrs. Werner would never have remarked she feared her powers of mimicry would get her into trouble.
"And I thought myself better than Dolly," considered Mrs. Werner. "Imagined I was a more faithful wife, a higher type of womanhood; I, who could not endure what she has borne so patiently; I, who must have compelled any man, sick or well, to bear the burden with me, who could never forgive any man weak enough or wicked enough to compass such ruin for his wife and family! My dear, the look in your poor face to-night, as you sat with the firelight gleaming upon it, will haunt me till I die."
The result of which meditation was that, the first thing on Christmas morning, Mrs. Werner despatched this note to Dolly by a special messenger,
"I wish, dear, you would give me a Christmas gift,—your promise that so soon as Mr. Mortomley's presence can be dispensed with at Salisbury House, you will go away from town for a short time. I am quite certain your husband will never get well in London, and there can be no doubt but that you require a change almost as much as he does,
With fond love,
Yours,
Leonora."