Bessie's Fortune

After this there was nothing more to be said. Daisy went back to her profession, and Bessie took up the old life again with an added burden of care and anxiety, and with a resolve that she would use for herself personally just as little as possible of the money her mother sent them. Often and often had she speculated upon and tried to fancy the class of men her mother associated with, and whom Lady Jane called her victims, and now here was one beside her, speaking and acting like a gentleman, and she felt her blood tingle with bitter shame and humiliation. Had her mother fleeced him, she wondered, and at last, lifting her sad eyes to his face, she said: "Do you know my mother well? Did you ever--play with her?"

"Yes, often," he replied; "side by side at rouge et noir, and at cards and chess where she is sure to beat. She bears a charmed hand, I think, or she would not be so successful."

He had lost money by her then, and Bessie at once found herself thinking that if she only knew how much, and who he was, she would pay it back pound for pound when she made a fortune.

In a vague kind of way she entertained a belief that somewhere in the world there was a fortune awaiting her; that little girl of fifteen summers, who sat there in Hyde Park, in her old washed linen dress and faded ribbons, with such a keen sense of pain in her heart for the mother who bore her, and pity for herself and her father. The latter had paid but little intention to what she was saying to her companion, for when he was not engrossed in the passers-by he had been half asleep, but when he caught the names rouge et noir and cards, he roused up and said: "Sir, my daughter has never played for money in her life, and never will."

"I am sure she will not," the stranger rejoined, "though many highly respectable ladies do;" then, as if he wished to chance the subject, he turned to Bessie and said: "If Neil McPherson is your cousin there ought to be some relationship between you and me, for he is my cousin, too."

"Yours?" Bessie asked, in some surprise, and he replied: "Yes, my father and his mother were cousins. I am Jack Trevellian. You have probably heard him speak of me."

"No," Bessie replied, with a decided shake of her head, which told plainly that neither from Neil nor any one else had she ever heard of Jack Trevellian, who felt a little chagrined that he, the man of fashion, whose name was so familiar in all the higher circles of London, should be wholly unknown to this girl from Wales.