Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/333

Rh 'Awful, I assure you. I've become for my mother a person who has made her make, all for nothing, an unprecedented advance, a humble submission; and she's so disgusted, all round, that it's no longer the same old charming thing for us to be together. It makes it worse for her that I'm still madly in love.'

'Well,' said Lady Champer after a moment, 'if you're still madly in love I can only be sorry for you.'

'You can do nothing for me?—don't advise me to go over?'

She had to take a longer pause. 'You don't at all know then what has happened?—that old Mr. Gunton has died and left her everything?'

All his vacancy and curiosity came out in a wild echo. '"Every thing"?'

'She writes me that it's a great deal of money.'

'You've just heard from her, then?'

'This morning. I seem to make out,' said Lady Champer, 'an extraordinary number of dollars.'

'Oh, I was sure it was!' the young man moaned.

'And she's engaged,' his friend went on, 'to Mr. Bransby.'

He bounded, rising before her. 'Mr. Bransby?'

'"Adam P."—the gentleman with whose mother and sis ters she went home. They, she writes, have beautifully welcomed her.'

Dio mio! The Prince stared; he had flushed with the blow, and the tears had come into his eyes. 'And I believed she loved me!'

'I didn't!' said Lady Champer with some curtness.

He gazed about; he almost rocked; and, unconscious of her words, he appealed, inarticulate and stricken. At last, however, he found his voice. 'What on earth then shall I do? I can less than ever go back to mamma!'

She got up for him, she thought for him, pushing a better chair into her circle. 'Stay here with me, and I'll ring for tea. Sit there nearer the fire—you're cold.'