"He'll hardly fail of making a good match now," Miss Eudora remarked,
caressing the pet spaniel which had climbed into her lap. "I think we
must manage to visit Saratoga or some of those places next summer. Mr.
Gardner found his wife at Newport, and they say she's worth half a
million."
"But horridly ugly," and Anna looked up from the reverie in which she
had been indulging. "Lottie says she has tow hair and a face like a
fish. John would never be happy with such a wife."
"Possibly you think he had better have married that sewing girl about
whom he wrote us just before going to Europe," Miss Eudora said
spitefully, pinching the long silken ears of her pet until the animal
yelled with pain.
There was a faint sigh from the direction of Anna's chair, and all knew
she was thinking of the missionary.
The mother continued: "I trust he is over that fancy, and ready to thank me for the strong letter I wrote him."
"Yes, but the girl," and Anna leaned her white cheek in her whiter hand.
"None of us know the harm his leaving her may have done. Don't you
remember he wrote how much she loved him--how gentle and confiding her
nature was, and how to leave her then might prove her ruin?"
"Our little Anna is growing very eloquent upon the subject of sewing
girls," Miss Asenath said, rather scornfully, and Anna rejoined: "I am not sure she was a sewing girl. He spoke of her as a schoolgirl."
"But it is most likely he did that to mislead us," said the mother. "The
only boarding school he knows anything about is the one where Lottie
was. If he were not her uncle by marriage I should not object to Lottie
as a daughter," was the next remark, whereupon there ensued a
conversation touching the merits and demerits of a certain Lottie
Gardner, whose father had taken for a second wife Miss Laura Richards.
This Laura had died within a year of her marriage, but Lottie had
claimed relationship to the family just the same, grandmaing Mrs.
Richards and aunty-ing the sisters. John, however, was never called
uncle, except in fun. He was too near her age, the young lady frequently
declaring that she had half a mind to throw aside all family ties and
lay siege to the handsome young man, who really was very popular with
the fair sex. During this discussion of Lottie, Anna had sat listlessly
looking up and down the columns of an old Herald, which Dick, Eudora's
pet dog, had ferreted out from the table and deposited at her feet.