“Come, come, child! None of that! I don't like it. I don't want to cry on the top of my rage. What is the man? Who is he? What does the woman know about him?”
At once Barbara began, and told her mother the whole story of Richard and herself. The mother listened. Old days and the memory of a lover, not high in the social scale, whom she had to give up to marry Mr. Wylder, came back upon her and her heart went with her daughter's before she knew what it was about; her daughter's love and her own seemed to mingle in one dusky shine, as if the daughter had inherited the mother's experience. The heart of the mother would not have her child like herself gather but weed-flowers of sorrow among the roses in the garden of love. She had learned this much, that the things the world prizes are of little good to still the hearts of women But when Barbara told her how lady Ann would have it that this same Richard, the bookbinder, was a natural son of sir Wilton, she started to her feet, crying,
“Then the natural bookbinder shall have her, and my lady's fool may go to the devil! You shall have my money, Bab, anyhow.”
“But, mammy dear,” said Barbara, “what will papa say?”
“Poof!” returned her mother. “I've known him too long to care what he says!”
“I don't like offending him,” returned Barbara.
“Don't mention him again, child, or I'll turn him loose on your bookbinder. Am I to put my own ewe-lamb to the same torture I had to suffer by marrying him! God forbid I When you're happy with your husband, perhaps you'll think of me sometimes and say, 'My mother did it! She wasn't a good woman, but she loved her Bab!'”
A passionate embrace followed. Barbara left the room with a happy heart, and went—not to her own to brood on her love, but to her brother's, whose feeble voice she heard calling her. Upon him her gladness overflowed.