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So Miss Dulane opened the interview. "Your tone and manner, my good friend, are no doubt provoked by the report in the newspaper of this morning. In justice to you, I refuse to believe the report." So Mrs. Newsham adopted her friend's suggestion. "You kindness is thrown away, Elizabeth. The report is true." "Matilda, you shock me!" "Why?" "At your age!"
ONE afternoon old Miss Dulane entered her drawing-room; ready to receive visitors, dressed in splendor, and exhibiting every outward appearance of a defiant frame of mind. Just as a saucy bronze nymph on the mantelpiece struck the quarter to three on an elegant clock under her arm, a visitor was announced "Mrs. Newsham."
Miss Dulane wore her own undisguised gray hair, dressed in perfect harmony with her time of life. Without an attempt at concealment, she submitted to be too short and too stout. Mrs. Newsham, tall and elegant, painted and dyed, acted on the opposite principle in dressing, which confesses nothing.
Add, if you like, the selfish luxury of helping poverty and wretchedness, and hearing my conscience tell me what an excellent man I am. I can't do all this on five hundred a year but I can do it on forty times five hundred a year. Moral: marry Miss Dulane."
He had justified Miss Dulane's confidence in him; acknowledging an attachment to a young widow, and adding that she had positively refused him. "We have not met since," he said, "and we shall never meet again." Under those circumstances, Miss Dulane had considerately abstained from asking for any further details.
Her last words were the bitterest words that she had spoken yet. "You have secured such a truly remarkable husband, my dear, that I am emboldened to ask a great favor. Will you give me his lordship's photograph?" "No," said Miss Dulane, "I won't give you his lordship's photograph." "What is your objection, Matilda?" "A very serious objection, Elizabeth.
Every effort to trace her has failed. Lost, my friend irretrievably lost to me!" He offered his hand and said good-night. Dick held him back on the doorstep. "Break off your mad engagement to Miss Dulane," he said. "Be a man, Howel; wait and hope! You are throwing away your life when happiness is within your reach, if you will only be patient. That poor young creature is worthy of you. Lost?
To look at your grim face, one would suppose there were no such things in the world as marriages of convenience." "Not at your time of life. I tell you plainly, your marriage will be a public scandal." "That doesn't frighten us," Miss Dulane remarked. "We are resigned to every ill-natured thing that our friends can say of us.
Who ever heard of profaning a contract?" "Call it what you please, Matilda. Do you expect to live a happy life, at your age, with a young man for your husband?" "A happy life," Miss Dulane repeated, "because it will be an innocent life." She laid a certain emphasis on the last word but one. Mrs. Newsham resented the emphasis, and rose to go.
"There isn't another man or woman in the whole circle of my acquaintance," he declared, "who would have congratulated me on marrying Miss Dulane. I believe you would make allowances for me if I had committed murder." "I hope I should," Dick answered gravely. "When a man is my friend murder or marriage I take it for granted that he has a reason for what he does. Wait a minute.
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