POISONED WORDS.
THE summer days, so full of joy for others, brought only sorrow and weariness to me.
Marian came to me often, and her looks seemed to invite the confidence which I would not bestow. At her first coming, I had been prompted to open my heart to her; but, after the dinner-party in Curzon Street, my impulse was checked. I was far too proud to tell her that I was jealous of my husband's old sweetheart; and she had too much delicacy to let me see that she suspected such a thing. Yet sometimes I almost fancied that she had found out the reason of my reserve.
I carefully avoided all mention of Miss Lorimer, but one day Marian introduced her name.
"Ida Lorimer is one of Aunt Baldock's friends," she remarked. "She always manages to amuse the old lady with her chitchat, and that is why she is asked to all our dinner-parties."
From Marian's tone, I inferred that she did not want Ida to be her friend; but I kept silence.
There were no more quarrels between Ronald and myself, but in the depth of my heart, I owned that our Eden was fast becoming a sorry wilderness. Our debts increased, and all my quiet savings were of no avail. It was indeed but "lost labour" for me to eat the bread of carefulness, for Ronald, sure of that glorious future of which he had spoken, was not disposed to deny himself little comforts. When he dined at home he was not contented with the plain fare which had satisfied him in our earlier wedded days. William Greystock had developed his natural taste for luxuries.
Every man is, I believe, a gourmand at heart, but the chance of being a glutton does not come to all. Greystock gave my husband plenty of opportunities of indulging his liking for dainties; and when Ronald and I ate at our table together, I had to listen to long lectures on the art of cooking. They were not uninstructive lectures; most women will do well to listen when a lord of the creation discourses of roast and boiled, sauce and gravy; but the consciousness of an empty purse made all this talk a weariness to we. Worse than a weariness—it was a pain.
One July afternoon, when I was sitting at the open window with my eternal mending work, a drowsiness began to steal over me, and my hands dropped heavily on my lap. It was a hot day; far off in country places the corn was ripening fast, and scarlet poppies were flaunting among the golden grain. I shut my eyes and called up a vision of the arbour at the end of my grandfather's garden—a veritable bower—
"Where honeysuckles, ripened by the sun,
Forbid the sun to enter."