"I wish," said Hester severely, "that you would go to sleep; at three in the morning I never want to talk."
"Well, of course, it may be that," said Emma somewhat inconsequently, "but I never want to sleep when I have been enjoying myself. I want to have some one in the same room and to talk it all over—everything that has happened. Who was that man, do you know who——"
And here she went into details which Hester, roused and angry, paid no attention to. But Emma was not dependent on replies. She went on asking questions, of which her companion took no notice, till the fly suddenly stopped with a great jarring and rattling, and the opening of two doors, and glimmers of two small lights in the profound dark, gave note of watchers in the two houses, warned by the slow rumbling of the ancient vehicle, and glad to be released from their respective vigils. In Hester's case it was her mother, wrapped in a warm dressing-gown, with a shawl over her head, and two anxious eyes shining out with warm reflections over her little candle, who received the girl in her finery with eager questions if she were very cold, if she were tired, if all had gone off well.
"Run up stairs, my darling, while I fasten the door," Mrs. John said. "There is a nice fire and you can warm yourself—and some tea."
In those days people, especially women, were not afraid of being kept awake because of a cup of tea.
"Mamma," said Hester when her mother followed her up stairs into the old-fashioned, low-roofed room, which the fire filled with rosy light, "it appears that Catherine Vernon says I ought not to wear your pearls. Has she anything to do with your pearls? Has she any right to interfere?"
"My pearls!" cried Mrs. John almost with a scream. "What could Catherine Vernon have to do with them? I think, dear, you must have fallen asleep and been dreaming. Where have you seen Catherine Vernon, Hester? She gives us our house, dear; you know we are so far indebted to her: but that is the only right she can have to interfere."
"Had she anything to do with my father?" Hester asked.
She was relieved from she did not know what indefinable terrors by the genuine astonishment in her mother's face.
"Anything to do with him? Of course; she had a great deal to do with him. She was his first cousin. Her father had brought him up. It was intended——but then he met me," said the gentle little woman, not without a tone of satisfaction in the incoherent tale. "And she was a kind of partner, and had a great deal to do with the bank. I never understood the rights of it, Hester. I never had any head for business. Wait, darling, till I undo these buttons. And now, my love, if you have got warm, go to bed. My pearls! She must mean, I suppose, that they are too good for you to wear because we are poor. They were my mother's, and her mother's before that. I would like to know what Catherine Vernon could have to say to them," Mrs. John said, taking the pearls from her child's throat and holding them up, all warm and shining, to the light, before she deposited them in their carefully padded bed.