Werner. "I do not imagine that the utterances of an _employee_ concerning his employer can be very profitable under any circumstances."

"Perhaps not," agreed Mrs. Mortomley; but she sighed again.

"Did you ever get your trunks away from Homewood," inquired Mrs. Werner, in order to change the subject.

"Yes," was the short reply.

"Did Mr. Swanland send them to you, or had you to apply for them again, or--"

"Mr. Swanland did not send them to me," said Dolly, as her friend paused. "I applied for them, and he first agreed I should have the boxes, and then thought it was a useless form having them removed from Homewood. So I said nothing more on the subject, and neither did he; but they are here."

"How did they come?" asked Mrs. Werner.

"That I cannot tell you. One Sunday evening, when I returned from church, they were piled up in the kitchen. I promised never to say how they were got away or who brought them; and, indeed, though half tempted to send them back again, I was thankful to have a few decent clothes to wear again once more."

Mrs. Werner looked down at her friend, and smiled as her glance wandered over the pale grey silk dress and black velvet upper skirt and bodice in which Dolly had thought fit to bemoan her lot.

Would Dolly ever be Dolly, she wondered, without her masses of hair--her pretty dresses--her small effects of jewellery--her little graceful knickknacks--and purely feminine deceptions.

No; they were an integral part of my heroine's imperfect character.

Honestly, and to be utterly outspoken, it was a comfort to Dolly, in the midst of her misery, to be able to array herself in purple and fine linen. Poor little soul! wretched though she might be and was, she did not feel herself so completely forsaken by God and man when attired in silk velvet and stiff silk as she might if only in a position to appear in a linsey gown. Vanity shall we say? As you please, my readers. The matter is really of little importance; only allow me to remark, there is a vanity near akin to self-respect--a desire to turn the best side of one's life's shield out for the world to see, which often invests poverty itself with a certain grace of reticence and dignity of non complaint, that we look for in vain amongst those who allow the unmended rags and tatters of their lost prosperity to flaunt in the breeze and stimulate the compassion of every passer-by.

"That reminds me, Dolly," said Mrs. Werner, after a slight pause. "I meant to buy you a Christmas present."

"I am very glad you did not carry out your intention then," retorted Mrs. Mortomley; "for I should not have taken the present."

Mrs. Werner laughed.

"I do not mean to buy it for you, Dolly," she remarked; "but I shall give it to you nevertheless."

"I will not have it," her friend repeated. "I will take nothing from you now, save love and kisses."

"Why, my dear?" asked Mrs. Werner. "In the old days Dolly Gerace would have accepted anything Leonora Trebasson offered her as freely as Leonora Trebasson would have taken Dolly's gift, small or large. What has come between us? What have I done, Dolly, that you should now shut the doors of your heart against me?"

"I have not shut the doors of my heart against you, Lenny, and you are wicked to say anything of the kind," was the reply. "But it is no longer you and me--it is no longer you and me, and your mother and my aunt, but--"

"Finish your sentence, dear," said Mrs. Werner, as Dolly paused, unwilling, in the presence of a man's wife, to terminate her utterance with an ungracious reference to the absent husband.

"There is no necessity," answered Mrs. Mortomley; "you know what I mean as well as I do myself."

"Let me see if you are right," was the reply, spoken almost caressingly.

"You would take anything from me, but you will have nothing from my husband--belonging to or coming from him--directly or indirectly; is not that your standpoint, Dolly?"

"Yes," Dolly answered. "I hate to seem ungracious, but I could receive nothing from your hands, knowing you were but the filter through which--"

"Mrs. Mortomley, you are eminently unhappy in your suggestions," said her friend. "We need not pursue your curious metaphor to its inevitable end. It is simply because I am Henry Werner's wife, and because, having no fortune of my own, my money comes from him that you refuse my little present."

"For once, Leonora, you have performed the marriage service over my words and yours, and made the twain one," answered Mrs. Mortomley. "To put the case plainly, I could take anything--a dry crust or a hundred thousand pounds from you, but I could not take a sovereign or a sovereign's worth from your husband."

"You mistake my husband, dear. But let that pass; or, rather, I cannot let it pass; for I must tell you, if Henry thought you wanted his help, he would be the first to ask me to offer it. Never shake your head, Dolly."

"I won't, Nora, if it vexes you."

"And say to me solemnly, love, that you only object to me because I am Henry Werner's wife; that you only refuse my present because bought with my husband's money."

"That is true, Lenny. I could refuse nothing that came from you yourself."

"Then, darling, you won't refuse this;" and Mrs. Werner placed in Dolly's hands a tiny little purse and pocket-book bound together in ivory. "Charley, my cousin--you remember Charley--sent me the contents of that purse to buy some little trinket for myself as a memory of the old days at Dassell. He has married an heiress, Dolly; and those waste lands in the north, my uncle was always lamenting over, have turned out to be a sort of El Dorado. Charley's dear kind letter reached me yesterday, and I straightway wrote back to him, saying,

"Besides yourself I never had but one friend in all my life. I wanted to make a present to her, and you have supplied the means. Believe me, in granting me the power to do this you have given me ropes of pearls--to quote Lothair--and miles on miles of diamonds; so there it is, dear--poor Charley's Christmas gift to me, of which my husband knows nothing."

And she rose, and fastening her fur cloak would have departed, but that Dolly, clutching her arm, said,

"Don't go, Leonora, for an instant. Let me exorcise my demon with the help of your presence."

"Pride, dear," suggested the other.

"I do not know--I cannot tell. He rends me to pieces, and I hate myself and him. I want your present badly, Lenny, and yet--and yet I long to compel you to take back your gift."

"Darling," answered Mrs. Werner, "though you are a mother, you never knew what it was to have a mother to love you. Fancy, for a moment I am your mother, saying, 'Dolly, keep it.' Could not that reconcile you, love. And some day it may be I or one belonging to me shall in bitter strait need your help; you would not then like to remember you had refused in your trouble to be assisted by one of us. You would not wish now to place a barrier between yourself and any one belonging to me who might hereafter ask your aid."

"No," Dolly answered slowly. "I should not. It may be--impossible as it now seems--that one of your children, or even you yourself, Leonora, might hereafter stand in need of such comfort as I could give; and just as surely as I take your present to-night, I will return your goodness then. In the words of The Book, 'May God do so to me and more if ever for ever I forget you and yours.'"

"Thank you, Dolly, it is a good vow for Christmas Eve. Good-bye dear, do not come out with me."

For reply, Dolly folding a shawl around her walked along the Grove and to the cross road where Mr. Werner's carriage was waiting.

"You ought not to be out in this damp night air," said Mrs. Werner.

But Dolly only shook her head. The footman banged the door, the coachman touched his horses, Mrs. Werner put down the window and waved her hand, and Dolly returned to the small house all alone. There, expecting perhaps to find a ten-pound note in the silken folds of the new purse, she opened Mrs. Werner's present; but, behold! it was no bank-note which her fingers discovered, but a slip of paper on which was written,

"Pay to Mrs. Werner or order one hundred pounds," and on the back a signature, that of "Leonora Werner."

CHAPTER III.

WHAT MR. LANG THOUGHT.

As Mrs. Werner drove home a cruel pain seemed tearing her heart to pieces. She had loved Dolly as child, as girl, as woman, with a love almost equalling that of a mother. She had longed for Dolly to be different, desired to see her grasp life with a firmer hand, and learn the lessons taught by experience as something more real than an idle jest. Dolly's frivolity had chafed her spirit even in the old Dassell days, but it had vexed her more since the time of her own marriage.

If she regarded the journey of existence as a serious affair, what right had Mr. Gerace's daughter to comport herself along the way as though she were but one of a picnic party, as though it were always first of May and fine weather with her?

Life should have been just as momentous a business at Homewood as at the West-End, where Henry Werner had set up his domestic gods; but Dolly could never be brought to see the iniquity of her own light-heartedness; and Mrs. Werner, who frequently found the hours and the days pass heavily enough in the ponderous atmosphere of respectability which her husband affected, could often have found it in her heart to box Dolly's ears for her levity of deportment and lightness of heart.

And now Dolly was serious enough, and yet Mrs. Werner felt dissatisfied--more than dissatisfied. She was in despair; the ideal Dolly she had always regarded as possible if not probable; but the frivolous, light-hearted, smiling Dolly she had foolishly desired to change, could never come back with her gay tones, with her laughing face, on this side Heaven.