“I have them all on now,” she said, and her laugh rang out again.

Sylvia surveyed her with a sort of rapture.  She had never heard of “Faust,” but the whole was a New England version of the “Jewel Song.”  As Marguerite had been tempted to guilty love by jewels, so Sylvia was striving to have Rose tempted by jewels to innocent celibacy.  But she was working by methods of which she knew nothing.

Rose gazed at herself in the glass.  A rose flush came on her cheeks, her lips pouted redly, and her eyes glittered under a mist.  She thrust her shining fingers through her hair, and it stood up like a golden spray over her temples.  Rose at that minute was wonderful.  Something akin to the gleam of the jewels seemed to have waked within her.  She felt a warmth of love and ownership of which she had never known herself capable.  She felt that the girl and her jewels, the girl who was the greatest jewel of all, was her very own.  For the first time a secret anxiety and distress of mind, which she had confided to no one, was allayed.  She said to herself that everything was as it should be.  She had Rose, and Rose was happy.  Then she thought how she had found the girl when she first entered the room, and had courage, seeing her as she looked now, to ask again:  “What was the matter?  Why were you crying?”

Rose turned upon her with a smile of perfect radiance.  “Nothing at all, dear Aunt Sylvia,” she cried, happily.  “Nothing at all.”

Sylvia smiled.  A smile was always somewhat of an effort for Sylvia, with her hard, thin lips, which had not been used to smiling.  Sylvia had no sense of humor.  Her smiles would never be possible except for sudden and unlooked-for pleasures, and those had been rare in her whole life.  But now she smiled, and with her lips and her eyes.  “Rose wasn’t crying because she thought Mr. Allen was going to marry another girl,” she told herself.  “She was only crying because a girl is always full of tantrums.  Now she is perfectly happy.  I am able to make her perfectly happy.  I know that all a girl needs in this world to make her happy and free from care is a woman to be a mother to her.  I am making her see it.  I can make up to her for everything.  Everything is as it should be.”

She stood gazing at Rose for a long moment before she spoke.  “Well,” said she, “you look like a whole jewelry shop.  I don’t see, for my part, how your aunt came to have so many—­why she wanted them.”

“Maybe they were given to her,” said Rose.  A tender thought of the dead woman who had gone from the house of her fathers, and left her jewels behind, softened her face.  “Poor Aunt Abrahama!” said she.  “She lived in this house all her life and was never married, and she must have come to think that all her pretty things had not amounted to much.”

“I don’t see why,” said Sylvia.  “I don’t see that it was any great hardship to live all her life in this nice house, and I don’t see what difference it made about her having nice things, whether she got married or not.  It could not have made any difference.”