CHAPTER V.

MONA DECLINES A PROPOSAL.

Mrs. Montague next took a square pasteboard box from the secret compartment in the table, and opened it.

On a bed of pure white cotton there lay some exquisite jewelry.  A pearl and diamond cross, a pair of unusually large whole pearls for the ears, and two narrow but costly bands for the wrists, set with the same precious gems.

“Pearls!” sneered the woman, giving the box, with its contents, an angry shake.  “He used to call her his ‘pearl,’ and so, forsooth, he had to represent his estimate of her in some tangible form.  There is nothing of the pearl-like nature about me,” she continued, with a short, bitter laugh.  “I am more like the cold, glittering diamond, and give me pure crystallized carbon every time in preference to any other gem.  He wasn’t niggardly with her on that score, either,” she concluded, lifting the upper layer of cotton, and revealing several diamond ornaments beneath.

“She was a proud little thing, though,” she mused, after gazing upon them in silence for a moment, “to go off and leave all these trinkets behind her.  I’d have taken them with me and made the most of them.  They haven’t done me much good, however, since they came into my possession.  I never could wear them without feeling as I did just now about the letters.  I might have sold them, I suppose, and I don’t know why I haven’t done so, unless it is because they are all marked.”

She covered them and threw the box from her with a passionate gesture, and then searched for a moment in silence among the remaining contents of the table.

She finally found what she wanted, apparently, for a look of triumph swept over her face.

It was a folded document, evidently of parchment.

“Ha, ha! prove your shrewd inferences, my keen-witted lawyer, if you can,” she muttered, exultantly, as she unfolded it, and ran her eyes over it.  “Mona Forester’s child the heir to the bulk of my husband’s property, indeed!  Perhaps, but she will have to prove it before she can get it.  How fortunate that I helped myself to these precious keepsakes when he was off his guard; even he did not dream that I had this,” and she shook the parchment until it rattled noisily through the room; then refolding it, she put it carelessly aside, and turned once more to what remained to be examined.

“Here is that exquisite point-lace fan,” she said, lifting a long, narrow box, and removing the lid.  “I never had a point-lace fan until I bought it for myself; and here is that picture; I never had his likeness painted on ivory and set in a frame of rubies!  Ha!  Miss Mona, you were a favored wench, but your triumph was of short duration.”

It is impossible to convey any idea of the bitterness of the woman’s tone, or the vindictiveness of her look, as she took from a velvet case the picture of a handsome young man, of perhaps twenty-five years, painted on ivory, and encircled with a costly frame of gold set with rubies.