CHAPTER IV.

LITTLE BESSIE.

“Oh, Archie, isn’t it a poky old place, and doesn’t it smell of rats and must?” Daisy said, as with her husband she went through the great rooms, whose only ornament consisted in the warm fires on the hearth and the pots of chrysanthemums and late roses which Dorothy had put here and there by way of brightening the house up a bit and making the home-coming more cheerful for the young people.

But it needed more than roses, and chrysanthemums, and fires to satisfy Daisy, who, forgetting the little back room in the dressmaker’s shop whence she came, and remembering only the delights of the Continent and the excitement of Monte Carlo, and the honor, as she thought it, of having a real live earl in her party, tossed her head a little and said she wished she was back in Paris.

But Archie did not share her feelings.  It had not been pleasant for him to see Daisy ogled and admired by men he wanted to knock down, nor had he quite liked the escapade at Monte Carlo, for, aside from the fear lest the fraud should be discovered, there was always before him a dread of what his Uncle John and the Lady Jane would say, should the affair ever reach their ears, as it might, for Lord Hardy was not very discreet, and was sure to tell of it sometime.

As to the playing, could he have had his choice he would far rather have played himself than to stand by and see Daisy do it.  But his vow to his father could not be broken, and so he was tolerably content, especially as the result was so far beyond his expectations.  Fifteen hundred pounds was the sum total of the gains, and Daisy, who held the purse and managed everything, played the lady of Stoneleigh to perfection, and made enemies of all her former friends, her mother included, and was only stopped in her career of folly by the birth of her baby, who was not at all welcome to the childish mother.

It was the latter part of March, and the crocuses and hyacinths were just beginning to blossom in the garden at Stoneleigh, when the baby Bessie first lay in the cradle which had rocked Archie in his infancy.  They did not call her Bessie at first; for there were many discussions with regard to the name, Archie wishing her called Dora for his mother, and Daisy inclining to Blanche, or Beatrice.

“I’ll tell you what, Archie,” she said one day.  “There’s that old maid aunt of yours in America, with piles of money, they say.  Let’s name the baby for her, and so get some of her filthy lucre.”

“Call our baby Betsey?  Are you crazy?” Archie asked.  But Daisy was in earnest, and carried her point, as she always did; and when at Easter Lord Hardy stopped at Stoneleigh, on his way to his home in Ireland, he was one of the sponsors for the child, who was christened Betsey.

“If I dared, I would add Jane to it, for her Ladyship, which would make her Betsey Jane; but that would be too much,” Daisy said to Lord Hardy, adding:  “We shall call her Bessie, of course, and never Betsey.  We only give her that abominable cognomen for the sake of wheedling something out of that old woman in America.  Archie is to write and tell her.”