Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/127

Rh if she did n't want to live here with mother. Or I 'd take her anywhere in the world she wanted to go. There 's money enough;" and so the treacherous hope allied itself to the blinded love, and both together lured John Bassett on until one day in midwinter he rang the door-bell of the grand house in which Fanny Lane lived "in town." He had not come with any assured hope; not at all; toward the last, his strong, good sense had come to look on the step more as a desperate remedy for a desperate hurt, than as a probable healing of the wound by the gentle and blessed healing of happiness. He said to himself, grimly: "It 's the only way I 'll every get free from it. I 've got to know the truth once for all; and I 'm not ashamed to ask her."

Mrs. Lane's black servant man had never seen at Mrs. Lane's door a person of precisely John Bassett's bearing. His first impression was, that he was some sort of tradesman, and he was on the point of giving him a seat in the hall, when John's quick and decisive tone—"Will you please say to Miss Lane that Mr. Bassett, from Deerway, wishes to see her," caused him to change his tactics, and usher this unclassed gentleman into the drawing-room.

On the very threshold of this room, John got his first blow. People who have been accustomed all their lives to laces and velvets, and paintings and statues in their rooms, can form no conception of