Aurora the Magnificent

"That she is Miss Seymour, my dear, and to my mind a melancholy lesson. Because Nature so plainly had not planned her for an old maid. Her mother--who told me? I think it was Miss Brown--interfered with her marrying the man she wished to, and she has accepted nothing in his place. It has been an empty life. And so it goes. One can't be sure, Etta."

"Jerome," Mrs. Foss's voice rose to a sharper protest and firmer rejection, "those are the cases we simply must not allow ourselves to think about. If we begin to think of cases like that...."

She did not finish and he said no more, but in the darkness through which the fiery point of his cigar continued for some time to glow, it is to be feared the faces of both went on to reflect for nobody to see the working of those thoughts precisely which Mrs. Foss had said with so much emphasis they must guard against.

CHAPTER II

Upon a day not much later in the