Page:Maud Howe - A Newport Aquarelle.djvu/155

 yet decided whether the next phrase should be one of refusal or acceptance.

The letter meant so much more than a mere invitation to drive; if she accepted it, she knew the results. Could she? The forbidding face of Amelia Carleton, once as handsome and attractive as her own, rose before her, hard, unyielding, frozen, and expressionless! "I will go with pleasure," were the words she wrote, and, signing herself as "Cordially yours," she despatched the note, and then, going to the glass, spent the next ten minutes in fastening the breast-knot of roses which Larkington had sent her, over her slow-beating heart.

The pin with which she fastened the roses she noticed was one of Herr Goldzchink's minor presents, which, when the others had been sent back to her discarded German lover, had been overlooked, and had only been discovered the week before in a drawer of her jewel-case.

On the hand which held the roses to her