"Then, no doubt he will be glad to see you," Miss Forcus said, and thought
to herself that now she was going to have the daughter of a felon for her
sister-in-law.
By way of solace to her family pride she turned from the impending,
disastrous marriage of the step-brother to that satisfying alliance her
own brother had made. The daughter of a baronet had been his wife--the
sister-in-law of a peer. The baronet was a banker, and rich. If the little
son had lived he would have inherited his grandfather's fortune which now
had gone to the son of Lord Brace. Lord Brace, who was an Irish peer,
wanted the money more than Francis, certainly, who had a sufficient
fortune of his own, even without that considerable one his wife had
received from her mother, and had left to him.
All such facts, which Ada Forcus generally accepted as a matter of course,
she now produced for the benefit of Deleah, meekly counting the stitches
of the Madonna lily, which when worked in beads, grounded in amber silk
and framed in gold, would be converted into a screen, to hang on the
marble mantelpiece in the Cashelthorpe drawing-room.
About the wife whom Sir Francis had loved and lost, who had lived for two
years in this beautiful home, sitting to read, and eat, and sew, in her
husband's company, walking the gardens by his side, cared for and tended
and watched over by him, Deleah had dreamed many dreams.
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