They walked in silence to the house.
The princess bent forward in the carriage-window as they drove away to look back at her. "I wish my son knew such women as that!" she cried.
"Son?" said the startled Mrs. Wilde. "You have not spoken before to me of your son, madame."
"I have always kept him under tutors—at Leipsic."
She leaned back as they drove through the sunshine, her filmy handkerchief to her painted eyes, seeing nothing but an ugly, honest-faced boy hard at work in a bare Presbyterian chapel. He would never know nor guess the life of shame which his mother led! Her tears were real now.
She even had wild, visionary thoughts of a confession, of staymaking, of so many dollars a week regularly. But she remembered the time when some fussy, good women had put her in charge of a fashionable Kindergarten. There was a fat salary! The house was luxurious: the teachers did the work. But one night she had broken the finical apparatus to pieces, left a heap of bonbons for the children, scrawled a verse of good-bye with chalk on the blackboard, and taken to the road again without a penny.
Rebecca Harding Davis.
[TO BE CONTINUED.]