Chapter XXXVI.
Whence came this?
This is some token from a newer friend.
Shakspeare.
The snow-flakes were falling softly and thick when Fleda got up the next morning.
"No ride for me to-day--but how very glad I am that I had a chance of setting that matter right. What could Mrs. Evelyn have been thinking of?--Very false kindness!--if I had disliked to go ever so much she ought to have made me, for my own sake, rather than let me seem so rude--it is true she didn't know how rude. O snow-flakes--how much purer and prettier you are than most things in this place!"
No one was in the breakfast parlour when Fleda came down, so she took her book and the dormeuse and had an hour of luxurious quiet before anybody appeared. Not a foot-fall in the house; nor even one outside to be heard, for the soft carpeting of snow which was laid over the streets. The gentle breathing of the fire the only sound in the room; while the very light came subdued through the falling snow and the thin muslin curtains, and gave an air of softer luxury to the apartment. "Money is pleasant," thought Fleda, as she took a little complacent review of all this before opening her book.--"And yet how unspeakably happier one may be without it than another with it. Happiness never was locked up in a purse yet. I am sure Hugh and I,--They must want me at home!--"
There was a little sober consideration of the lumps of coal and the contented looking blaze in the grate, a most essentially home-like thing,--and then Fleda went to her book and for the space of an hour turned over her pages without interruption. At the end of the hour "the fowling piece," certainly the noiseliest of his kind, put his head in, but seeing none of his ladies took it and himself away again and left Fleda in peace for another half hour. Then appeared Mrs. Evelyn in her morning wrapper, and only stopping at the bell-handle, came up to the dormeuse and stooping down kissed Fleda's forehead, with so much tenderness that it won a look of most affectionate gratitude in reply.
"Fleda my dear, we set you a sad example. But you won't copy it. Joe, breakfast. Has Mr. Evelyn gone down town?"
"Yes, ma'am, two hours ago."
"Did it ever occur to you, Fleda my dear," said Mrs. Evelyn, breaking the lumps of coal with the poker in a very leisurely satisfied kind of a way,--"Did it ever occur to you to rejoice that you were not born a business man? What a life!--"