“Her home is in St. Louis; she had never been in Dunellen until a month since; she was her father’s pet and lived abroad with him until he died a year ago! He named her Naughty Nan. She has plenty of money and plenty of lovers! She is going home under the escort of Mr. Towne and his mother. Perhaps it is her laugh that has stolen his heart from Sue! Naughty Nan was to be married, but the gentleman died in consumption.”
“And she can laugh as lightly as that! If my father should die I would never laugh again.”
V.—HEARTS THAT WERE WAITING.
On the evening of the eighteenth of January, Tessa was sitting alone in her chamber, wrapped in her shawl, writing. She was keeping a secret, for she was writing a book and no one knew it but Mr. Hammerton; he would not have known it had not several questions arisen to which she could find no answer.
“I can not do without my encyclopedia,” she had said.
She had written the title lovingly—“Under the Wings.”
This chamber was her sanctuary; she was born in this room, she had lived in it ever since; her little battles had been fought on this consecrated ground, her angry tears, her wilful tears, and the few later grateful tears had fallen while kneeling at the side of the white-draped bed or sitting at the window with her head in her hands or on the window-sill. A stranger would have thought it a plain, low room with its cottage set of pale green and gold trimmings, its ingrain carpet of oak leaves on a green ground, its gray paper with scarlet border, and three white shades with scarlet tassels.
The high mantel was piled with books, the gifts of her father, Mr. Hammerton, and Miss Jewett; on the walls were photographs in oval black-walnut frames of Miss Jewett, sitting at a table with her elbow upon it and one hand resting on a book in her lap, of her father and mother, she sitting and he standing behind her, and one of herself and Dinah, taken when they were fifteen and twenty-one; there were also a large photograph taken from a painting of the Mater Dolorosa, which Mr. Hammerton had given her on her fourteenth birthday and a chromo of Red Riding Hood that he had given to Dinah upon her fourteenth birthday. Upon the table at which she was writing, books were piled, and a package of old letters that she had been sorting, and choosing some to burn, among which were two from Felix Harrison. The package contained several from Mr. Hammerton, but his were never worth burning; they were only worth keeping because they were so like himself. Pages of manuscript were scattered among the books, and a long envelope contained two rejected articles that she had planned to rewrite after a consultation with Mr. Hammerton and to send elsewhere. She had cried over her first rejected article (when she was eighteen), and two years afterward had revised it, changed the title, and her father had been proud of it in print.
She was writing and thinking of Sue when a noisy entrance below announced her presence.
“Go right up,” said Mrs. Wadsworth’s voice. “Tessa is star-gazing in her room. Don’t stay if you are chilly. Tessa likes to be cold.”