“I hardly think madame would have made the sleeves this way unless it was the latest,” said Rose.

“I don’t know anything about the latest,” said Sylvia.  “We folks here in East Westland try to get the best.”  Sylvia felt as if she were chiding her own daughter.  She spoke sternly, but her eyes beamed with pleasure.  The young girl’s discomfiture seemed to sweeten her very soul.

“For mercy’s sake, hold up your dress going down-stairs,” she admonished.  “I swept the stairs this morning, but the dust gathers before you can say boo, and that dress won’t do up.”

Rose gathered up the tail of her gown obediently, and she also experienced a certain odd pleasure.  New England blood was in her veins.  It was something new and precious to be admonished as a New England girl might be admonished by a fond mother.

When she went into the south room, still clinging timidly to her lace train, Horace rose.  Henry sat still.  He looked at her with pleased interest, but it did not occur to him to rise.  Horace always rose when Sylvia entered a room, and Henry always rather resented it.  “Putting on society airs,” he thought to himself, with a sneer.

However, he smiled involuntarily; the girl was so very pretty and so very unlike anything which he had ever seen.  “Dressed up as if she were going to a ball, in a dress made like a night-gown,” he thought, but he smiled.  As for Horace, he felt dazzled.  He had scarcely realized how pretty Rose was under the dark-blue mist of her veil.  He placed a chair for her, and began talking about the journey and the weather while Sylvia got supper.  Henry was reading the local paper.  Rose’s eyes kept wandering to that.  Suddenly she sprang to her feet, was across the room in a white swirl, and snatched the paper from Henry’s hands.

“What is this, oh, what is this?” she cried out.

She had read before Horace could stop her.  She turned upon him, then upon Henry.  Her face was very pale and working with emotion.

“Oh,” she cried, “you only telegraphed me that poor Cousin Eliza was dead!  You did not either of you tell me she was murdered.  I loved her, although I had not seen her for years, because I have so few to whom my love seemed to belong.  I was sorry because she was dead, but murdered!”

Rose threw herself on a chair, and sobbed and sobbed.

“I loved her; I did love her,” she kept repeating, like a distressed child.  “I did love her, poor Cousin Eliza, and she was murdered.  I did love her.”

Chapter IX

Horace was right in his assumption that the case against Lucinda Hart and Hannah Simmons would never be pressed.  Although it was proved beyond a doubt that Eliza Farrel had swallowed arsenic in a sufficiently large quantity to cause death, the utter absence of motive was in the favor of the accused, and then the suspicion that the poison might have been self-administered, if not with suicidal intent, with another, steadily gained ground.  Many thought Miss Farrel’s wonderful complexion might easily have been induced by the use of arsenic.