The Fruit of the Tree | Page 9

her father, Mr. Langhope. Tell him what the
doctor says--I'll be on my legs in a day or two--ask 'em to wait till I can
take 'em over the mills."
He shot one of his fugitive glances at his assistant, and held up a bony
hand. "Wait a minute. On your way there, stop and notify Mr. Gaines.
He was to meet them here. You understand?"
"Yes, sir," said Amherst; and at that moment Mrs. Truscomb appeared
on the threshold.
"I must ask you to come now, Mr. Amherst," she began haughtily; but a
glance from her husband reduced her to a heaving pink nonentity.
"Hold on, Amherst. I hear you've been in to Hanaford. Did you go to
the hospital?"
"Ezra--" his wife murmured: he looked through her.
"Yes," said Amherst.
Truscomb's face seemed to grow smaller and dryer. He transferred his
look from his wife to his assistant.
"All right. You'll just bear in mind that it's Disbrow's business to report
Dillon's case to Mrs. Westmore? You're to confine yourself to my
message. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly clear. Goodnight," Amherst answered, as he turned to follow
Mrs. Truscomb.
* * * * *
That same evening, four persons were seated under the bronze
chandelier in the red satin drawing-room of the Westmore mansion.
One of the four, the young lady in widow's weeds whose face had
arrested Miss Brent's attention that afternoon, rose from a massively

upholstered sofa and drifted over to the fireplace near which her father
sat.
"Didn't I tell you it was awful, father?" she sighed, leaning
despondently against the high carved mantelpiece surmounted by a
bronze clock in the form of an obelisk.
Mr. Langhope, who sat smoking, with one faultlessly-clad leg crossed
on the other, and his ebony stick reposing against the arm of his chair,
raised his clear ironical eyes to her face.
"As an archæologist," he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand,
"I find it positively interesting. I should really like to come here and
dig."
There were no lamps in the room, and the numerous gas-jets of the
chandelier shed their lights impartially on ponderously framed canvases
of the Bay of Naples and the Hudson in Autumn, on Carrara busts and
bronze Indians on velvet pedestals.
"All this," murmured Mr. Langhope, "is getting to be as rare as the
giant sequoias. In another fifty years we shall have collectors fighting
for that Bay of Naples."
Bessy Westmore turned from him impatiently. When she felt deeply on
any subject her father's flippancy annoyed her.
"You can see, Maria," she said, seating herself beside the other lady of
the party, "why I couldn't possibly live here."
Mrs. Eustace Ansell, immediately after dinner, had bent her slender
back above the velvet-covered writing-table, where an inkstand of
Vienna ormolu offered its empty cup to her pen. Being habitually
charged with a voluminous correspondence, she had foreseen this
contingency and met it by despatching her maid for her own
writing-case, which was now outspread before her in all its complex
neatness; but at Bessy's appeal she wiped her pen, and turned a
sympathetic gaze on her companion.

Mrs. Ansell's face drew all its charm from its adaptability. It was a
different face to each speaker: now kindling with irony, now gently
maternal, now charged with abstract meditation--and few paused to
reflect that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to some one
else's view of life.
"It needs doing over," she admitted, following the widow's melancholy
glance about the room. "But you are a spoilt child to complain. Think
of having a house of your own to come to, instead of having to put up
at the Hanaford hotel!"
Mrs. Westmore's attention was arrested by the first part of the reply.
"Doing over? Why in the world should I do it over? No one could
expect me to come here now--could they, Mr. Tredegar?" she
exclaimed, transferring her appeal to the fourth member of the party.
Mr. Tredegar, the family lawyer, who had deemed it his duty to
accompany the widow on her visit of inspection, was strolling up and
down the room with short pompous steps, a cigar between his lips, and
his arms behind him. He cocked his sparrow-like head, scanned the
offending apartment, and terminated his survey by resting his eyes on
Mrs. Westmore's charming petulant face.
"It all depends," he replied axiomatically, "how large an income you
require."
Mr. Tredegar uttered this remark with the air of one who pronounces on
an important point in law: his lightest observation seemed a decision
handed down from the bench to which he had never ascended. He
restored the cigar to his lips, and sought approval in Mrs. Ansell's
expressive eye.
"Ah, that's it, Bessy. You've that to remember," the older