She could have been used more advantageously if she had been kept out of the desired circle for a couple of years longer, because she was ready to pay any price for her admission. The good ladies made a slight mistake in being too hasty to control the bottomless purse, because, after she had got fairly installed, the purse was worked in several other ways, and the ecclesiastical drain on it became reduced to an ordinary amount. She gave a fair sum to each of the charities and accepted the attentions of those whom the odor of money attracted, without troubling herself in the slightest degree about the periodical financial difficulties of the institutions.
Yet she never altogether relaxed her efforts in "working for the Lord," as she called it, in such good company. She acquired a taste for it that never left her. She would take a couple of the "poor but honest" ladies of good family with her, in her sumptuous barouche, to the "Incurables" and other places. After a capital luncheon at her house they would visit the "Home," and sometimes kiss the poor women there; and if the strengthening sympathy and religious value of Mrs. Lindon's kiss did not bind them to a life of virtue ever afterward they must indeed have been lost—in every sense of the word.
Nina was not born for some time after Mr. and Mrs. Lindon had been married. Her mother had kept her, when a child, very much in the dark as to their antecedents, and, as the social position of the family had been well established by Mrs. Lindon when Nina was very young, the girl always had grown up with the idea that she was a lady; and in spite of a few wants in her father and some doubts as to her mother's origin, she came out into society with a fixed idea that she was "quite good enough for the colonies," as she laughingly told her friends.
No pains or expense had been spared in her education. She had first gone to the best Toronto school, and had "finished" at a boarding-school in England. Jack Cresswell knew her when she was at school, where she shared his heart with several others. When she emerged from the educational chrysalis and floated for the first time down a society ball-room Jack was after the butterfly hat-in-hand, as it were, and never as yet had he given up the chase. Mr. Lindon knew nothing of domestic affairs, but he had found Jack so frequently at his house that he had begun to see that his ambitious plans for his daughter were perhaps in danger of being frustrated, and so, having at that time to send a man to England to float the shares of some company on the London market, he decided to go himself, and one day, when Jack was dining there, he rather paralyzed all, especially Jack, by instructing his wife and daughter to be ready in a week for the journey.
The parting on Jack's part would have been tender if Nina had not been in such exasperatingly high spirits—hilarity he found it quite impossible to participate in or appreciate. He made her excuses to himself, like the decent soul he was, although he really suffered a good deal. He was an ardent youth, and for the week prior to departure he received very little of the sympathy he hungered for, but he tried to speak cheerfully as he held her hand in saying good-by.
"Well, now, you won't forget your promise, old lady, will you?" he said, while he tried to photograph her in his mind as she stood bewitchingly before him.
"What! and throw over the French count that proposed to me in London?" she said archly. Jack muttered something under his breath that sounded like hostility toward the French count.
She heard him, however, and said: "Certainly. So we will. It will kill him, but you will rejoice. And I will come back and marry Jack. There! isn't it nice of me to say that? Now, kiss me and say good-by!"
She withdrew, and held the porch door so that only her face appeared, which Jack lightly touched with his lips, and then he went away speechless. As he went he heard her singing:
"And I'll come back to my own true love,
Ten thousand miles away."