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Now then, Ella was with you tonight; you and she were alone together a long time." "Well," growled Dunn, "what of it?" "Fine girl, isn't she?" asked Deede Dawson, and laughed. Dunn did not speak. It filled him with such loathing to hear this man so much as utter Ella's name, it was all he could do to keep his hands motionless by his side and not make use of them about the other's throat.
"Ah, but she would know the difference," she cried. "Lily loves you with all of her heart. And your mother is really trying to be neater, to make a better home for you! She hasn't a pleasant time of it, either your mother. But she doesn't run away. She stays!" There was scorn in the laugh that came, all at once, from Ella's twisted mouth. Her great eyes were somberly sarcastic.
Why does she bother to be so agreeable to me when she never was before? Why does she make me ask her to dinner, when I don't want to?" Each question knocked on Flora's brain to the accompaniment of Ella's furious rocking. She could not answer them, and Ella's explanation, absurd as it seemed, coming on top of her high expectations, wasn't impossible.
He looked indeed as respectable as his sinister and forbidding countenance would permit, and though Deede Dawson had made him as smart as possible, he had permitted him to gratify his own florid taste in adornment, so that his air of prosperity and wealth had the appearance of being that of some recently-enriched vulgarian whose association with a motor-car and a well-dressed girl of Ella's type was probably due to the fact that he had recently purchased them both out of newly-acquired wealth.
At the sight of that man Ella's hands, that had been holding her wrap close to her throat, feeling for its silver clasp, fell limp, and the splendid mass of white brocade slipped to the floor and lay in folds about her feet, revealing her lovely figure sparkling from the hem of her dress to the top of her shapely head.
Saunders had written "Kennie, six years old," and the date, or "Totty, aged nine" she never tired of looking at them now, and of telling Susan that the buttons on Ella's dress had been of sterling silver, "made right from Papa's mine," and that the little ship Kenneth held had cost twenty-five dollars. All of her conversation was boastful, in an inoffensive, faded sort of way.
Either Ella's horse was scary, or she did it a purpose, for the minit she got near, it began to rare and she would have fell off, if that man hadn't catched it by the bit, and held her on with t'other hand. "When did Ella return?" asked Mary, who had not before heard of her sister's arrival. "I don't know," said Mr. Knight.
The very expressive look which accompanied this remark made Ella's heart beat rapidly, for Henry had never before said any thing quite so pointed, and the cloud, which for a time had rested on her brow, disappeared. When they reached Mr. Selden's house, Henry announced his intention of calling also to inquire after Mary whom he respected on her sister's account!
The countenance of the good dame had altered less, perhaps, than Ella's, owing to her strong masculine spirit; but still there was an expression of anxiety and sadness thereon, which, until of late, had never been visible not even when on her march to what, as she then believed, was her final doom the excitement whereof, and the many events that occurred on the route, having been sufficient to occupy her mind in a different manner from what it had been in brooding over the fate of her husband for months in secret, and in a place of comparative safety.
Under any other circumstances, the plumber's compliments on her taste and his lugubrious assumption of character of the Destroying Angel would have sorely tried, if not completely upset, Ella's gravity; as it was, she was too wretched to have more than a passing and quite unappreciative sense of his absurdity.
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