Mrs. Sutton could endure everything else better--and she believed
that it was the same with Frederic--than the needless and puerile
trickery to which Rosa resorted to achieve the most trivial
purposes. If she wished that one of her sisters should pass the day
with her, or to sit up for a part of the night, she worked upon her
by means of others' intercessions, or broached the subject by covert
passages, the end of which, she flattered herself, was successfully
masked, until her train was ready for explosion. Did she set her
fancy upon any particular article of diet, the same tortuous course
was pursued to present the delicacy in question to the mind of him
or her who, she designed, should be the provider. Under her sauciest
rattle of fun or perversity lurked some subtle meaning. She had
either some end to subserve, or wanted to possess herself of some
bit of information she could have gained sooner and more easily by
direct inquiry. Cajolery and intrigue had become a second nature,
stronger than the original; and it never occurred to her that her
wiles, in her mental and bodily decadence, were transparent as they
had once been artful.
A discovery, made on the fourth day of her visit, excited Mrs.
Sutton's sympathies in behalf of the much enduring husband to a
pitch it required long and serious pondering upon the wife's
weakness and critical condition to restrain from indignant
demonstration.
Rosa was sleeping more soundly than usual under the influence of an
anodyne, and Frederic, with a whispered apology to his coadjutor,
went into the next room, leaving the door ajar. From her seat, Mrs.
Sutton had a distinct view of him in an opposite mirror--a
circumstance of which she was not aware for several minutes.
Happening, then, to look up from her knitting she saw that he was
writing, and half an hour afterward that he was leaning back in his
chair, looking at something in the hollow of his hand, a mingling of
such love and sadness in his countenance that she felt it would be
unlawful prying into his most sacred feelings for her to watch him
longer. He turned his head at the slight rustle she made in removing
to another part of the room, and beckoned to her. At her approach,
he arose and held out a morocco case, containing the miniature of a
child--a bright-eyed, delicate-featured girl of seven or eight
summers--exquisitely painted.
"You have never seen my little Florence, I think?"
"I have not. She is pretty--and resembles you strongly."
He did not color or laugh at the unconscious compliment, or seem
pleased at her praise of his darling. Instead, there crept over his
face a shade of more painful sadness, darkening his eyes and
compressing his lip, as he answered-"So every one says. She is the dearest child in the world--a sunbeam
of gladness in any house--amiable, affectionate, and intelligent. I
wish you would read her last letter to me. She is a better
correspondent than many grown people." Then, smiling,
apologetically, "If my commendation seem overstrained, you will
excuse a father's partiality."