Mrs. Sutton could endure everything else better—­and she believed that it was the same with Frederic—­than the needless and puerile trickery to which Rosa resorted to achieve the most trivial purposes.  If she wished that one of her sisters should pass the day with her, or to sit up for a part of the night, she worked upon her by means of others’ intercessions, or broached the subject by covert passages, the end of which, she flattered herself, was successfully masked, until her train was ready for explosion.  Did she set her fancy upon any particular article of diet, the same tortuous course was pursued to present the delicacy in question to the mind of him or her who, she designed, should be the provider.  Under her sauciest rattle of fun or perversity lurked some subtle meaning.  She had either some end to subserve, or wanted to possess herself of some bit of information she could have gained sooner and more easily by direct inquiry.  Cajolery and intrigue had become a second nature, stronger than the original; and it never occurred to her that her wiles, in her mental and bodily decadence, were transparent as they had once been artful.

A discovery, made on the fourth day of her visit, excited Mrs. Sutton’s sympathies in behalf of the much enduring husband to a pitch it required long and serious pondering upon the wife’s weakness and critical condition to restrain from indignant demonstration.

Rosa was sleeping more soundly than usual under the influence of an anodyne, and Frederic, with a whispered apology to his coadjutor, went into the next room, leaving the door ajar.  From her seat, Mrs. Sutton had a distinct view of him in an opposite mirror—­a circumstance of which she was not aware for several minutes.  Happening, then, to look up from her knitting she saw that he was writing, and half an hour afterward that he was leaning back in his chair, looking at something in the hollow of his hand, a mingling of such love and sadness in his countenance that she felt it would be unlawful prying into his most sacred feelings for her to watch him longer.  He turned his head at the slight rustle she made in removing to another part of the room, and beckoned to her.  At her approach, he arose and held out a morocco case, containing the miniature of a child—­a bright-eyed, delicate-featured girl of seven or eight summers—­exquisitely painted.

“You have never seen my little Florence, I think?”

“I have not.  She is pretty—­and resembles you strongly.”

He did not color or laugh at the unconscious compliment, or seem pleased at her praise of his darling.  Instead, there crept over his face a shade of more painful sadness, darkening his eyes and compressing his lip, as he answered—­

“So every one says.  She is the dearest child in the world—­a sunbeam of gladness in any house—­amiable, affectionate, and intelligent.  I wish you would read her last letter to me.  She is a better correspondent than many grown people.”  Then, smiling, apologetically, “If my commendation seem overstrained, you will excuse a father’s partiality.”