Chapter 15

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_ Chapter XV

While Henry was at Sidney Meeks's, Horace sat alone smoking and reading the evening paper. He kept looking up from the paper and listening. He was hoping that Rose, in spite of the fact that she had not been able to come down to supper, might yet make her appearance. He speculated on her altered looks and manner at dinner. He could not help being a little anxious, in spite of all Mrs. Ayres's assurances and the really vague nature of his own foreboding. He asked himself if he had had from the beginning anything upon which to base suspicion. Given the premises of an abnormal girl with a passion for himself which humiliated him, an abnormal woman like Miss Farrel with a similar passion, albeit under better control, the melodramatic phases of the candy, and sudden death, and traces of arsenical poison, what should be the conclusion?

He himself had eaten some of presumably the same candy with no ill effects. Mrs. Ayres had assured him of her constant watchfulness over her daughter, who was no doubt in an alarmingly nervous state, but was she necessarily dangerous? He doubted if Mrs. Ayres had left the two girls a moment to themselves during the drive. What possible reason, after all, had he for alarm?

When he heard Sylvia mounting the stairs, and caught a glimpse of a little tray borne carefully, he gave up all hope of Rose's coming down. Presently he went out and walked down the village street, smoking. As he passed out of the yard he glanced up at Rose's windows, and saw the bright light behind the curtains. He felt glad that the girl had a woman like Sylvia to care for her.

As he looked Sylvia's shadow passed between the window and the light. It had, in its shadowy enlargement, a benignant aspect. There was an angelic, motherly bend to the vague shoulders. Sylvia was really in her element. She petted and scolded the girl, whom she found flung upon her bed like a castaway flower, sobbing pitifully.

"What on earth is the matter?" demanded Sylvia, in a honeyed tone, which at once stung and sweetened. "Here you are in the dark, crying and going without your victuals. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

As she spoke Sylvia struck a match and lit the lamp. Rose buried her face deeper in the bed.

"I don't want any lamp," she gasped.

"Don't want any lamp? Ain't you ashamed of yourself? I should think you were a baby. You are going to have a lamp, and you are going to sit up and eat your supper." Sylvia drew down the white shades carefully, then she bent over the girl. She did not touch her, but she was quivering with maternal passion which seemed to embrace without any physical contact. "Now, what is the matter?" she said.

"Nothing."

"What is the matter?" repeated Sylvia, insistently.

Suddenly Rose sat up. "Nothing is the matter," she said. "I am just nervous." She made an effort to control her face. She smiled at Sylvia with her wet eyes and swollen mouth. She resolutely dabbed at her flushed face with a damp little ball of handkerchief.

Sylvia turned to the bureau and took a fresh handkerchief from the drawer. She sprinkled it with some toilet water that was on the dressing-table, and gave it to Rose. "Here is a clean handkerchief," she said, "and I've put some of your perfumery on it. Give me the other."

Rose took the sweet-smelling square of linen and tried to smile again. "I just got nervous," she said.

"Set down here in this chair," said Sylvia, "and I'll draw up the little table, and I want you to eat your supper. I've brought up something real nice for you."

"Thank you, Aunt Sylvia; you're a dear," said Rose, pitifully, "but--I don't think I can eat anything." In spite of herself the girl's face quivered again and fresh tears welled into her eyes. She passed her scented handkerchief over them. "I am not a bit hungry," she said, brokenly.

Sylvia drew a large, chintz-covered chair forward. "Set right down in this chair," she said, firmly. And Rose slid weakly from the bed and sank into the chair. She watched, with a sort of dull gratitude, while Sylvia spread a little table with a towel and set out the tray.

"There," said she. "Here is some cream toast and some of those new pease, and a little chop, spring lamb, and a cup of tea. Now you just eat every mite of it, and then I've got a saucer of strawberries and cream for you to top off with."

Rose looked hopelessly at the dainty fare. Then she looked at Sylvia. The impulse to tell another woman her trouble got the better of her. If women had not other women in whom to confide, there are times when their natures would be too much for them. "I heard some news this morning," said she. She attempted to make her voice exceedingly light and casual.

"What?"

"I heard about Mr. Allen's engagement."

"Engagement to who?"

"To--Lucy."

"Lucy!"

"Lucy Ayres. She seems to be a very sweet girl. She is very pretty. I hope she will make him very happy." Rose's voice trembled with sad hypocrisy.

"Who told you?" demanded Sylvia.

"She told me herself."

"Did her mother hear it?"

"She did, but I think she did not understand. Lucy spoke in French. She talks French very well. She studied with Miss Farrel, you know. I think Lucy has done all in her power to fit herself to become a good wife for an educated man."

"What did she tell you in French for? Why didn't she speak in English?"

"I don't know."

"Well, I know. She did it so her mother wouldn't hear, and say in English that she was telling an awful whopper. Mr. Allen is no more engaged to Lucy Ayres than I am."

Rose gazed at Sylvia with sudden eagerness. "What makes you think so, Aunt Sylvia?"

"Nothing makes me think what I know. Mr. Allen has never paid any attention to Lucy Ayres, beyond what he couldn't help, and she's made a mountain out of a mole-hill. Lucy Ayres is man-crazy, that's all. You needn't tell me."

"Then you don't think--?"

"I know better. I'll ask Mr. Allen."

"If you asked him it would make it very hard for him if it wasn't so," said Rose.

"I don't see why."

"Mr. Allen is a gentleman, and he could not practically accuse a woman of making an unauthorized claim of that sort," said Rose.

"Well, I won't say anything about it to him if you think I had better not," said Sylvia, "but I must say I think it's pretty hard on a man to have a girl going round telling folks he's engaged to her when he ain't. Eat that lamb chop and them pease while they're hot."

"I am going to. They are delicious. I didn't think I was hungry at all, but to have things brought up this way--"

"You've got to eat a saucer of strawberries afterwards," said Sylvia, happily.

She watched the girl eat, and she was in a sort of ecstasy, which was, nevertheless, troubled. After a while, when Rose had nearly finished the strawberries, Sylvia ventured a remark.

"Lucy Ayres is a queer girl," said she. "I've known all about her for some time. She has been thinking young men were in love with her, when they never had an idea of such a thing, ever since she was so high."

Sylvia indicated by her out-stretched hand a point about a foot and a half from the floor.

"It seems as if she must have had some reason sometimes," said Rose, with an impulse of loyalty towards the other girl. "She is very pretty."

"As far as I know, no young man in East Westland has ever thought of marrying her," said Sylvia. "I think myself they are afraid of her. It doesn't do for a girl to act too anxious to get married. She just cuts her own nose off."

"I have never seen her do anything unbecoming," began Rose; then she stopped, for Lucy's expression, which had caused a revolt in her, was directly within her mental vision.

It seemed as if Sylvia interpreted her thought. "I have seen her making eyes," said she.

Rose was silent. She realized that she, also, had seen poor Lucy making eyes.

"What a girl is so crazy to get married for, anyway, when she has a good mother and a good home, I can't see," said Sylvia, leading directly up to the subject in the secret place of her mind.

Rose blushed, with apparently no reason. "But she can't have her mother always, you know, Aunt Sylvia," said she.

"Her mother's folks are awful long-lived."

"But Lucy is younger. In the course of nature she will outlive her mother, and then she will be all alone."

"What if she is? 'Ain't she got her good home and money enough to be independent? Lucy won't need to lift a finger to earn money if she's careful."

"I always thought it would be very dreadful to live alone," Rose said, with another blush.

"Well, she needn't be alone. There's plenty of women always in want of a home. No woman need live alone if she don't want to."

"But it isn't quite like--" Rose hesitated.

"Like what?"

"It wouldn't seem quite so much as if you had your own home, would it, as if--" Rose hesitated again.

Sylvia interrupted her. "A girl is a fool to get married if she's got money enough to live on," said she.

"Why, Aunt Sylvia, wouldn't you have married Uncle Henry if you had had plenty of money?" asked the girl, exactly as Henry had done.

Sylvia colored faintly. "That was a very different matter," said she.

"But why?"

"Because it was," said Sylvia, bringing up one of her impregnable ramparts against argument.

But the girl persisted. "I don't see why," she said.

Sylvia colored again. "Well, for one thing, your uncle Henry is one man in a thousand," said she. "I know every silly girl thinks she has found just that man, but it's only once in a thousand times she does; and she's mighty lucky if she don't find out that the man in a thousand is another woman's husband, when she gets her eyes open. Then there's another thing: nothing has ever come betwixt us."

"I don't know what you mean."

"I mean we've had no family," said Sylvia, firmly, although her color deepened. "I know you think it's awful for me to say such a thing, but look right up and down this street at the folks that got married about the same time Henry and I did. How many of them that's had families 'ain't had reason to regret it? I tell you what it is, child, girls don't know everything. It's awful having children, and straining every nerve to bring them up right, and then to have them go off in six months in consumption, the way the Masons lost their three children, two boys and a girl. Or to worry and fuss until you are worn to a shadow, the way Mrs. George Emerson has over her son, and then have him take to drink. There wasn't any consumption in the Mason family on either side in a straight line, but the three children all went with it. And there ain't any drink in the Emerson family, on her side or his, all as straight as a string, but Mrs. Everson was a Weaver, and she had a great-uncle who drank himself to death. I don't believe there's a family anywhere around that hasn't got some dreadful thing in it to leak out, when you don't expect it, in children. Sometimes it only leaks in a straight line, and sometimes it leaks sidewise. You never know. Now here's my family. I was a White, you know, like your aunt Abrahama. There's consumption in our family, the worst kind. I never had any doubt but what Henry and I would have lost our children, if we'd had any."

"But you didn't have any," said Rose, in a curiously naive and hopeful tone.

"We are the only ones of all that got married about the time we did who didn't have any," said Sylvia, in her conclusive tone.

"But, Aunt Sylvia," said Rose, "you wouldn't stop everybody's getting married? Why, there wouldn't be any people in the world in a short time."

"There's some people in the world now that would be a good sight better off out of it, for themselves and other folks," said Sylvia.

"Then you don't think anybody ought to get married?"

"If folks want to be fools, let them. Nothing I can say is going to stop them, but I'll miss my guess if some of the girls that get married had the faintest idea what they were going into they would stop short, if it sent them over a rail-fence. Folks can't tell girls everything, but marriage is an awful risk, an awful risk. And I say, as I said before, any girl who has got enough to live on is a fool to get married."

"But I don't see why, after all."

"Because she is," replied Sylvia.

This time Rose did not attempt to bruise herself against the elder woman's imperturbability. She did not look convinced, but again the troubled expression came over her face.

"I am glad you relished your supper," said Sylvia.

"It was very nice," replied Rose, absently. Suddenly the look of white horror which had overspread her countenance on the night of her arrival possessed it again.

"What on earth is the matter?" cried Sylvia.

"I almost remembered, then," gasped the girl. "You know what I told you the night I came. Don't let me remember, Aunt Sylvia. I think I shall die if I ever do."

Sylvia was as white as the girl, but she rose briskly. "There's nothing to remember," she said. "You're nervous, but I'm going to make some of that root-beer of mine to-morrow. It has hops in it, and it's real quieting. Now you stop worrying, and wait a minute. I've got something to show you. Here, you look at this book you've been reading, and stop thinking. I'll be back in a minute. I've just got to step into the other chamber."

Sylvia was back in a moment. She never was obliged to hesitate for a second as to the whereabouts of any of her possessions. She had some little boxes in her hand, and one rather large one under her arm. Rose looked at them with interest. "What is it, Aunt Sylvia?" said she.

Sylvia laughed. "Something to show you that belongs to you," she said.

"Why, what have you got that belongs to me, Aunt Sylvia?"

"You wait a minute."

Sylvia and Rose both stood beside the white dressing-table, and Sylvia opened the boxes, one after another, and slowly and impressively removed their contents, and laid them in orderly rows on the white dimity of the table. The lamplight shone on them, and the table blazed like an altar with jewelled fires. Rose gasped. "Why, Aunt Sylvia!" said she.

"All these things belonged to your aunt Abrahama, and now they belong to you," said Sylvia, in a triumphant tone.

"Why, but these are perfectly beautiful things!"

"Yes; I don't believe anybody in East Westland ever knew she had them. I don't believe she could have worn them, even when she was a girl, or I should have heard of them. I found them all in her bureau drawer. She didn't even keep them under lock and key; but then she never went out anywhere, and if nobody even knew she had them, they were safe enough. Now they're all yours."

"But they belong to you, Aunt Sylvia."

Sylvia took up the most valuable thing there, a really good pearl necklace, and held it dangling from her skinny hand. "I should look pretty with this around my neck, shouldn't I?" she said. "I wanted to wear that pink silk, but when it comes to some things I ain't quite out of my mind. Here, try it on."

Rose clasped the necklace about her white, round throat, and smiled at herself in the glass. Rose wore a gown of soft, green China silk, and the pearls over its lace collar surrounded her face with soft gleams of rose and green.

"These amethysts are exquisite," said Rose, after she had done admiring herself. She took up, one after another, a ring, a bracelet, a necklace, a brooch, and ear-rings, all of clear, pale amethysts in beautiful settings.

"You could wear these," she said to Sylvia.

"I guess I sha'n't begin to wear jewelry at my time of life," declared Sylvia. Her voice sounded almost angry in its insistence. "Everything here is yours," she said, and nodded her head and set her mouth hard for further emphasis.

The display upon the dressing-table, although not of great value, was in reality rather unusual. All of the pieces were, of course, old, and there were more semi-precious than precious stones, but the settings were good and the whole enough to delight any girl. Rose hung over them in ecstasy. She had not many jewels. Somehow her income had never seemed to admit of jewels. She was pleased as a child. Finally she hung some pearl ear-rings over her ears by bits of white silk, her ears not being pierced. She allowed the pearl necklace to remain. She clasped on her arms some charming cameo bracelets and a heavy gold one set with a miniature of a lady. She covered her slender fingers with rings and pinned old brooches all over her bosom. She fastened a pearl spray in her hair, and a heavy shell comb. Then she fairly laughed out loud. "There!" said she to Sylvia, and laughed again.

Sylvia also laughed, and her laugh had the ring of a child's. "Don't you feel as if you were pretty well off as you are?" said she.

Rose sprang forward and hugged Sylvia. "Well off!" said she. "Well off! I never knew a girl who was better off. To think of my being here with you, and your being as good as a mother to me, and Uncle Henry as good as a father; and this dear old house; and to see myself fairly loaded down with jewels like a crown-princess. I never knew I liked such things so much. I am fairly ashamed."

Rose kissed Sylvia with such vehemence that the elder woman started back, then she turned again to her mirror. She held up her hands and made the gems flash with colored lights. There were several very good diamonds, although not of modern cut; there was a fairly superb emerald, also pearls and amethysts and green-blue turquoises, on her hands. Rose made a pounce upon a necklace of pink coral, and clasped it around her neck over the pearls.

"I have them all on now," she said, and her laugh rang out again.

Sylvia surveyed her with a sort of rapture. She had never heard of "Faust," but the whole was a New England version of the "Jewel Song." As Marguerite had been tempted to guilty love by jewels, so Sylvia was striving to have Rose tempted by jewels to innocent celibacy. But she was working by methods of which she knew nothing.

Rose gazed at herself in the glass. A rose flush came on her cheeks, her lips pouted redly, and her eyes glittered under a mist. She thrust her shining fingers through her hair, and it stood up like a golden spray over her temples. Rose at that minute was wonderful. Something akin to the gleam of the jewels seemed to have waked within her. She felt a warmth of love and ownership of which she had never known herself capable. She felt that the girl and her jewels, the girl who was the greatest jewel of all, was her very own. For the first time a secret anxiety and distress of mind, which she had confided to no one, was allayed. She said to herself that everything was as it should be. She had Rose, and Rose was happy. Then she thought how she had found the girl when she first entered the room, and had courage, seeing her as she looked now, to ask again: "What was the matter? Why were you crying?"

Rose turned upon her with a smile of perfect radiance. "Nothing at all, dear Aunt Sylvia," she cried, happily. "Nothing at all."

Sylvia smiled. A smile was always somewhat of an effort for Sylvia, with her hard, thin lips, which had not been used to smiling. Sylvia had no sense of humor. Her smiles would never be possible except for sudden and unlooked-for pleasures, and those had been rare in her whole life. But now she smiled, and with her lips and her eyes. "Rose wasn't crying because she thought Mr. Allen was going to marry another girl," she told herself. "She was only crying because a girl is always full of tantrums. Now she is perfectly happy. I am able to make her perfectly happy. I know that all a girl needs in this world to make her happy and free from care is a woman to be a mother to her. I am making her see it. I can make up to her for everything. Everything is as it should be."

She stood gazing at Rose for a long moment before she spoke. "Well," said she, "you look like a whole jewelry shop. I don't see, for my part, how your aunt came to have so many--why she wanted them."

"Maybe they were given to her," said Rose. A tender thought of the dead woman who had gone from the house of her fathers, and left her jewels behind, softened her face. "Poor Aunt Abrahama!" said she. "She lived in this house all her life and was never married, and she must have come to think that all her pretty things had not amounted to much."

"I don't see why," said Sylvia. "I don't see that it was any great hardship to live all her life in this nice house, and I don't see what difference it made about her having nice things, whether she got married or not. It could not have made any difference."

"Why not?" asked Rose, looking at her with a mischievous flash of blue eyes. A long green gleam like a note of music shot out from the emerald on her finger as she raised it in a slight gesture. "To have all these beautiful things put away in a drawer, and never to have anybody see her in them, must have made some difference."

"It wouldn't make a mite," said Sylvia, stoutly.

"I don't see why."

"Because it wouldn't."

Rose laughed, and looked again at herself in the glass.

"Now you had better take off those things and go to bed, and try to go to sleep," said Sylvia.

"Yes, Aunt Sylvia," said Rose. But she did not stir, except to turn this way and that, to bring out more colored lights from the jewels.

Sylvia had to mix bread that night, and she was obliged to go. Rose promised that she would immediately go to bed, and kissed her again with such effusion that the older woman started back. The soft, impetuous kiss caused her cheek to fairly tingle as she went down-stairs and about her work. It should have been luminous from the light it made in her heart.

When Henry came home, with a guilty sense of what he was to do next day, and which he had not courage enough to reveal, he looked at his wife with relief at her changed expression. "I declare, Sylvia, you look like yourself to-night," he said. "You've been looking kind of curious to me lately."

"You imagined it," said Sylvia. She had finished mixing the bread, and had washed her hands and was wiping them on the roller-towel in the kitchen.

"Maybe I did," admitted Henry. "You look like yourself to-night, anyhow. How is Rose?"

"Rose is all right. Young girls are always getting nervous kinks. I took her supper up to her, and she ate every mite, and now I have given her her aunt's jewelry and she's tickled to pieces with it, standing before the looking-glass and staring at herself like a little peacock." Sylvia laughed with tender triumph.

"I suppose now she'll be decking herself out, and every young man in East Westland will be after her," said Henry. He laughed, but a little bitterly. He, also, was not altogether unselfish concerning the proprietorship of this young thing which had come into his elderly life. He was not as Sylvia, but although he would have denied it he privately doubted if even Horace was quite good enough for this girl. When it came to it, in his heart of hearts, he doubted if any but the fatherly love which he himself gave might be altogether good for her.

"Rose is perfectly contented just the way she is," declared Sylvia, turning upon him. "I shouldn't be surprised if she lived out her days here, just as her aunt did."

"Maybe it would be the best thing," said Henry. "She's got us as long as we live." Henry straightened himself as he spoke. Since his resolve to resume his work he had felt years younger. Lately he had been telling himself miserably that he was an old man, that his life-work was over. To-night the pulses of youth leaped in his veins. He was so pleasantly excited that after he and Sylvia had gone to bed it was long before he fell asleep, but he did at last, and just in time for Rose and Horace.

Rose, after Sylvia went down-stairs, had put out her light and sat down beside the window gazing out into the night. She still wore her jewels. She could not bear to take them off. It was a beautiful night. The day had been rather warm, but the night was one of coolness and peace. The moon was just rising. Rose could see it through the leafy branches of an opposite elm-tree. It seemed to be caught in the green foliage. New shadows were leaping out of the distance as the moon increased. The whole landscape was dotted with white luminosities which it was bliss not to explain, just to leave mysteries. Wonderful sweetnesses and fresh scents of growing things, dew-wet, came in her face.

Rose was very happy. Only an hour before she had been miserable, and now her whole spirit had leaped above her woe as with the impetus of some celestial fluid rarer than all the miseries of earth and of a necessity surmounting them. She looked out at the night, and it was to her as if that and the whole world was her jewel-casket, and the jewels therein were immortal, and infinite in possibilities of giving and receiving glory and joy. Rose thought of Horace, and a delicious thrill went over her whole body. Then she thought of Lucy Ayres, and felt both pity and a sort of angry and contemptuous repulsion. "How a girl can do so!" she thought.

Intuitively she knew that what she felt for Horace was a far nobler love than Lucy's. "Love--was it love, after all?" Rose did not know, but she gave her head a proud shake. "I never would put him in such a position, and lie about him, just because--" she said to herself.

She did not finish her sentence. Rose was innately modest even as to her own self-disclosures. Her emotions were so healthy that she had the power to keep them under the wings of her spirit, both to guard and hold the superior place. She had a feeling that Lucy Ayres's love for Horace was in a way an insult to him. After what Sylvia had said, she had not a doubt as to the falsity of what Lucy had told her during their drive. She and Lucy had been on the front seat of the carriage, when Lucy had intimated that there was an understanding between herself and Horace. She had spoken very low, in French, and Rose had been obliged to ask her to repeat her words. Immediately Lucy's mother's head was between the two girls, and the bunch of violets on her bonnet grazed Rose's ear.

"What are you saying?" she had asked Lucy, sharply. And Lucy had lied. "I said what a pleasant day it is," she replied.

"You said it in French."

"Yes, mother."

"Next time say it in English," said Mrs. Ayres.

Of course, if Lucy had lied to her mother, she had lied to her. She had lied in two languages. "She must be a very strange girl," thought Rose. She resolved that she could not go to see Lucy very often, and a little pang of regret shot through her. She had been very ready to love poor Lucy.

Presently, as Rose sat beside the window, she heard footsteps on the gravel sidewalk outside the front yard, and then a man's figure came into view, like a moving shadow. She knew the figure was a man because there was no swing of skirts. Her heart beat fast when the man opened the front gate and shut it with a faint click. She wondered if it could be Horace, but immediately she saw, from the slightly sidewise shoulders and gait, that it was Henry Whitman. She heard him enter; she heard doors opened and closed. After a time she heard a murmur of voices. Then there was a flash of light across the yard, from a lighted lamp being carried through a room below. The light was reflected on the ceiling of her room. Then it vanished, and everything was quiet. Rose thought that Sylvia and Henry had retired for the night. She almost knew that Horace was not in the house. She had heard him go out after supper and she had not heard him enter. He had a habit of taking long walks on fine nights.

Rose sat and wondered. Once the suspicion smote her that possibly, after all, Lucy had spoken the truth, that Horace was with her. Then she dismissed the suspicion as unworthy of her. She recalled what Sylvia had said; she recalled how she herself had heard Lucy lie. She knew that Horace could not be fond of a girl like that, and he had known her quite a long time. Again Rose's young rapture and belief in her own happiness reigned. She sat still, and the moon at last sailed out of the feathery clasp of the elm branches, and the whole landscape was in a pale, clear glow. Then Horace came. Rose started up. She stood for an instant irresolute, then she stole out of her room and down the spiral stair very noiselessly. She opened the front door before Horace could insert his key in the latch.

Horace started back.

"Hush," whispered Rose. She stifled a laugh. "Step back out in the yard just a minute," she whispered.

Horace obeyed. He stepped softly back, and Rose joined him after she had closed the door with great care.

"Now come down as far as the gate, out of the shadows," whispered Rose. "I want to show you something."

The two stole down to the gate. Then Rose faced Horace in full glare of moonlight.

"Look at me," said she, and she stifled another laugh of pure, childish delight.

Horace looked. Only a few of the stones which Rose wore caught the moonlight to any extent, but she was all of a shimmer and gleam, like a creature decked with dewdrops.

"Look at me," she whispered again.

"I am looking."

"Do you see?"

"What?"

"They are poor Aunt Abrahama's jewels. Aunt Sylvia gave them to me. Aren't they beautiful? Such lovely, old-fashioned settings. You can't half see in the moonlight. You shall see them by day."

"It is beautiful enough now," said Horace, with a sort of gasp. "Those are pearls around your neck?"

"Yes, really lovely pearls; and such carved pink coral! And look at the dear old pearl spray in my hair. Wait; I'll turn my head so the moon will show on it. Isn't it dear?"

"Yes, it is," replied Horace, regarding the delicate spray of seed pearls on Rose's head.

"And only look at these bracelets and these rings; and I had to tie the ear-rings on because my ears are not pierced. Would you have them pierced and wear them as they are--I believe ear-rings are coming into vogue again--or would you have them made into rings?"

"Rings," said Horace, emphatically.

"I think that will be better. I fancy the ear-rings dangling make me a little nervous already. See all these brooches, and the rings."

Rose held up her hands and twirled her ring-laden fingers, and laughed again.

"They are pretty large, most of the rings," said she. "There is one pearl and one emerald that are charming, and several of the dearest old-fashioned things. Think of poor Aunt Abrahama having all these lovely things packed away in a bureau drawer and never wearing them."

"I should rather have packed away my name," said Horace.

"So should I. Isn't it awful? The Abrahama is simply dreadful, and the way it comes down with a sort of whack on the White! Poor Aunt Abrahama! I feel almost guilty having all her pretty jewels and being so pleased with them."

"Oh, she would be pleased, too, if she knew."

"I don't know. She and my mother had been estranged for years, ever since my mother's marriage. Would she be pleased, do you think?"

"Of course she would, and as for the things themselves, they are fulfilling their mission."

Rose laughed. "Maybe jewels don't like to be shut up for years and years in a drawer, away from the light," said she. "They do seem almost alive. Look, you can really see the green in that emerald!"

Horace was trembling from head to foot. He could hardly reply.

"Why, you are shivering," said Rose. "Are you cold?"

"No--well, perhaps yes, a little. It is rather cool to-night after the hot day."

"Where have you been?"

"I walked to Tunbury and back."

"That is seven miles. That ought to have warmed you. Well, I think we must go in. I don't know what Aunt Sylvia would say."

"Why should she mind?"

"I don't know. She might not think I should have run out here as I did. I think all these jewels went to my head. Come. Please walk very softly."

Horace hesitated.

"Come," repeated Rose, imperatively, and started.

Horace followed.

The night before they had been on the verge of a love scene, now it seemed impossible, incongruous. Horace was full of tender longing, but he felt that to gratify it would be to pass the impossible.

"Please be very still," whispered Rose, when they had reached the house door. She herself began opening it, turning the knob by slow degrees. All the time she was stifling her laughter. Horace felt that the stifled laughter was the main factor in prohibiting the love-making.

Rose turned the knob and removed her hand as she pushed the door open; then something fell with a tiny tinkle on the stone step. Both stopped.

"One of my rings," whispered Rose.

Horace stooped and felt over the stone slab, and finally his hand struck the tiny thing.

"It's that queer little flat gold one," continued Rose, who was now serious.

A sudden boldness possessed Horace. "May I have it?" he said.

"It's not a bit pretty. I don't believe you can wear it."

Horace slipped the ring on his little finger. "It just fits."

"I don't care," Rose said, hesitatingly. "Aunt Sylvia gave me the things. I don't believe she will care. And there are two more flat gold rings, anyway. She will not notice, only perhaps I ought to tell her."

"If you think it will make any trouble for you--"

"Oh no; keep it. It is interesting because it is old-fashioned, and as far as giving it away is concerned, I could give away half of these trinkets. I can't go around decked out like this, nor begin to wear all the rings. I certainly never should have put that ring on again."

Horace felt daunted by her light valuation of it, but when he was in the house, and in his room, and neither Sylvia nor Henry had been awakened, he removed the thing and looked at it closely. All the inner surface was covered with a clear inscription, very clear, although of a necessity in minute characters--"Let love abide whate'er betide."

Horace laughed tenderly. "She has given me more than she knows," he thought. _

Read next: Chapter 16

Read previous: Chapter 14

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