"Thank you, my dear; I don't want chairs nor anything else while I
can talk so," she answered, smiling. "You had better take a run in the
garden when you come back;" and Rose replied with a nod of assent
that made the colonel smile and say, "Good-bye then, my sweet Lady
Discretion, some day we will be better acquainted."
"Dear child," said Ermine, "she is our great blessing, and some day I
trust will be the same to her dear father. Oh, Colin! it is too much to
hope that you have not believed what you must have heard! And yet you
wrote to him."
"Nay, I could not but feel great distrust of what I heard, since I
was also told that his sisters were unconvinced; and besides, I had
continually seen him at school the victim of other people's faults."
"This is best of all," exclaimed Ermine, with glistening eyes, and hand
laid upon his; "it is the most comfortable word I have heard since it
happened. Yes, indeed, many a time before I saw you, had I heard of
'Keith' as the friend who saw him righted. Oh, Colin! thanks, thanks for
believing in him more than for all!"
"Not believing, but knowing," he answered--"knowing both you and Edward.
Besides, is it not almost invariable that the inventor is ruined by his
invention--a Prospero by nature?"
"It was not the invention," she answered; "that throve as long as my
father lived."
"Yes, he was an excellent man of business."
"And he thought the concern so secure that there was no danger in
embarking all the available capital of the family in it, and it did
bring us in a very good income."
"I remember that it struck me that the people at home would find that
they had made a mistake after all, and missed a fortune for me! It was
an invention for diminishing the fragility of glass under heat; was it
not?"
"Yes, and the manufacture was very prosperous, so that my father was
quite at ease about us. After his death we made a home for Edward in
London, and looked after him when he used to be smitten with some new
idea and forgot all sublunary matters. When he married we went to live
at Richmond, and had his dear little wife very much with us, for she was
a delicate tender creature, half killed by London. In process of time he
fell in with a man named Maddox, plausible and clever, who became a sort
of manager, especially while Edward was in his trances of invention; and
at all times knew more about his accounts than he did himself. Nothing
but my father's authority had ever made him really look into them, and
this man took them all off his hands. There was a matter about the
glass that Edward was bent on ascertaining, and he went to study the
manufacture in Bohemia, taking his wife with him, and leaving Rose with
us. Shortly after, Dr. Long and Harry Beauchamp received letters asking
for a considerable advance, to be laid out on the materials that this
improvement would require. Immediately afterwards came the crash."