Page:Arminell, a social romance (1896).djvu/71

Rh oven out of a cellar and passed every now and then back again to the latter. This alteration of temperatures would kill him.

Some time elapsed before Mrs. Saltren returned. She descended the stair slowly, sighing, with the sheet over her arm.

"You need not fear to catch the fever from it, miss," she said, "it has been washed many times since it was used—with my tears."

Arminell's heart was full. She took the sheet and looked at it. How good, how considerate her mother had been. And what a touch of real feeling this was in the faithful creature, to cherish the token of her mother's kindness.

The young are sentimental, and are incapable of distinguishing true feeling from false rhodomontade.

"Why!" exclaimed Arminell, "it has a mark in the corner S S,—does not that stand for your husband's initials?"

The woman seemed a little taken aback, but soon recovered herself.

"It may be so. But it comes about like this. I asked Stephen to mark the sheet with a double L. for Louisa, Lady Lamerton, and a coronet over, but he was so scrupulous, he said it might be supposed I had carried it away from the park, and that as the sheet was given to us, we'd have it marked as our own. My husband is as particular about his conscience as one must be with the bones in a herring. It was Bond's marking ink he used," said Mrs. Saltren, eager to give minute circumstances that might serve as confirmation of her story, "and there was a stretcher of wood, a sort of hoop, that strained the linen whilst it was being written on. If you have any doubt, miss, about my story, you've only to ask for a bottle of Bond's marking ink and you will see that they have circular stretchers—which is a proof that this is the identical sheet