“You aren’t for calling this luke-warm affair sacred, I hope?” Bobby asked with fine sarcasm. Whereupon she smiled suddenly and pulled his scornful young face down to hers and kissed it.
“It’s one way out,” she explained; and he was silent in face of the reasonableness of her reply.
Chapter Twenty Five.
Christmas came and brought with it Edward Morgan’s gift to his fiancée, a rope of pearls, so beautiful and costly that Prudence, on taking the shining thing from its bed of velvet, and holding it in her hands, was moved with a sense of remorse at the inadequacy of the return she was making this man, who showered gifts upon her in token of his love. She did not want his presents; they were an embarrassment and a distress.
The thought of wearing the pearls, as in the letter which accompanied them he requested her to do, on Christmas night, was distasteful to her on account of the continuous flow of witticism she would be forced to meet from William, who already had revealed a new inventiveness on presenting the registered package to her, and had manifested open curiosity as to its contents, which she had failed to gratify. And she dreaded the cold criticism of Bobby’s appraising eye. Bobby would possibly refrain from verbal comment, but his face would express the more.
She locked the pearls away and decided that she would show them to no one; she would ignore the request that came with them. In any case they were too valuable to wear at a quiet dinner at home, at which the only guests would be Matilda and her husband, who, still in uncertainty as to his living, waited on in Wortheton in hopeful expectation. To wear the pearls in Ernest’s presence, and suffer William’s sly pleasantries unmoved, was more than she felt equal to. Ernest, through the medium of his wife, had expressed amazement at her engagement, which he attributed to worldly considerations.
“She is incapable of appreciating the seriousness of marriage,” he had told Matilda. “Her mind is light and inclines to frivolity, and material advantages.”
That his own inclination had been towards a comfortable income, was a point he was apt to overlook.