The Storm Centre. Mary Noailles Murfree

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СКАЧАТЬ yet she maintained throughout a mask of placidity to the world, inquisitive, pitying, ridiculing, as she knew it to be. The separation passed as temporary. She was making a visit to her former home. This feint had the more countenance when a sudden need for her presence arose. Her aunt fell ill and died, and soon there came tidings of the death of Clarence Roscoe's wife while he was far away in the Confederate army. The three little girls were all alone.

      "Bring them here, Uncle Gerald. I will take charge of them," Leonora had said. "Perhaps I can feel less dependent then."

      And Judge Roscoe, who had borne his own losses like a philosopher, had tears in his eyes for her losses. "Oh, poor Leonora!" he had exclaimed. "Your very presence is a boon, my dear. But for you to be so stricken and desolate and—"

      He was about to say "robbed," but the facts forbade him; for Gwynn's legal rights rendered her position as difficult as unenviable. In her own house she had contrived to hold her belongings together. Now, day by day, came tidings of the sale of her special personal effects—her carriage, her domestic animals, her furniture, the very pictures on the walls; then had followed a letter from her husband, regretting all his misdeeds and promising infinite rehabilitation if she would but forgive him. Naught could provoke a remonstrance, could stimulate Leonora to action, could induce a return.

      Judge Roscoe had said but little. He had the deep-seated juridical respect for the relation of man and wife as a creation of law, as well as an institution of God. When he was appealed to, he felt it his duty to place impartially before her the husband's arguments, and promises, and protestations, but he experienced intense relief when she tersely dismissed Rufus Gwynn's plea for a reconciliation. "I know him now," she replied.

      "An' 'fore de Lawd, I knows him too!" her old nurse declared; "I jes' uped an' I sez, 'Marse Rufe, ye hev' got sech a notion o' sellin' out, ye mought sell old Chaney—ef ennybody would buy sech a contraption in dese days! So I'm goin' over to my old home at Judge Roscoe's place, to wait on Miss Leonora. I knows she needs me, an' I 'spect she's watchin' fur me now.' An' Marse Rufe, he says, 'Aunt Chaney, I don't know what you are talking about! Go over there, an' welcome! An' try to get my wife to see I was just overtaken in my temper and desperate; you persuade her to come back, Aunt Chaney.' Dat's what de debbil said ter me. I always heard dat de debbil had a club foot. But, mon, he ain't. Two long, slim, handsome feet, an' his boots, sah, made in New Orleens!"

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