doubted, swept over her careless face. “I was enabled to procure them in time; but for a whole two months I had to go without diamonds.” She did not say that she had bartered her wedding jewels to make up the sum she needed, but he may have understood that without being told.
“And that is the last time you have seen him?” He held her eyes with his, she could not look away.
“The very last, sir; strange to say.”
His glance shifted from her face and he turned with a bow towards the door.
“May I ask,” she slowly inquired as he moved across the floor, “what is the reason of this sudden interest in poor papa?”
“Certainly,” said he, pausing and looking back, not without some emotion of pity in his glance. “I am sometimes struck with a sense of the duty I owe you, in helping you to bear the burden of certain secret responsibilities which I fear may sometimes prove too heavy for you.”
She gave a little rippling laugh that only sounded hollow to the image listening in the glass. “You choose strange times in which to be struck,” said she, holding up two dresses for his inspection, with a lift of her brows evidently meant as an inquiry as to which he thought the most becoming.
“Conscience is the chooser, not I,” declared he, for once allowing himself to ignore the weighty question of dress thus propounded.
His wife gave a little toss of her head and he left the room.
“I should like Edward very much,” murmured she in a burst of confidence to her own reflection in the glass, “if only he would not bother himself so much about that same disagreeable conscience.”