"Mamma!" and Clemence's fine eyes glow with generous indignation, "how can you speak thus of one of the noblest traits of my father's character? I love and honor him for it, and I ask God daily to make me worthy to be the child of such a parent."
"Well, my dear," cooly replies mamma, "if it will afford you any satisfaction to hear it, you resemble him in every respect. In fact, I see more plainly every day, there is not a trait of the Leveridge's about you, deeply as I deplore it. I had hoped to have a daughter after my own heart. I sometimes think you do not wish to please me in anything."
"Oh!" cried Clemence, "how greatly you misunderstand me. You do not know how much I love you. I have often wished that we were poor, so I could have you all to myself, to show, by a lifetime of devotion, what is in my heart."
The delicate lady, splendid in misty lace and jewels, gave a little nervous shudder at the bare thought of poverty.
"What strange fancies you have, child, and how little you know of the realities of life." But gazing into the pure face, with a vague dread for that future, and knowing that One alone knew whether it might contain happiness or misery for her darling, she said, with visible emotion, "You are a good girl, Clemence, and whatever may be in the future, remember that I always sought your welfare as the one great object of my existence. Always remember that, Clemence."
"I will, my own dearest mother," the girl answered brokenly; and neither could see the other through a mist of tears.
Was it a presentiment of their coming fate?
Clemence thought often, amid the gloom that followed, that it was; and many times in her dream-haunted slumbers, murmured, "Always remember that, Clemence; always remember that."
If the stylish Mrs. Graystone, who could boast of the most aristocratic descent, and whose haughty family had considered it quite a condescension when she married the self-made merchant—if the little lady had sinned very deeply in wishing to secure for her only child a husband in every way suitable, in her opinion, to a descendant of the Leveridges of Leveridge, she was destined to a full expiation of her wrong, and her towering pride to a fall so great that those who had envied her her life-long prosperity, would say with ill-concealed delight—"served them right! what will become of their lofty ambition and refined sensibilities now, I wonder?"—"I knew it would not last forever."—"It's a long lane that never turns;" with many more remarks to the same effect.
"Between you and me and the four walls of this room," said one Mrs. Crane to her neighbor, "I don't pity them Graystones as much as I should, if they hadn't always carried their heads so high above everybody else, who was just as good as themselves, if they couldn't trace back their descent to the landin' of the Pilgrims."