Some people in the position of Mrs Berry would have said that Mr Walcheren had done ‘the handsome thing’ by her daughter, and that she was lucky to have got so well out of the scrape. But Rhoda’s mother thought differently. She enclosed the cheque in another letter and sent it back to Frederick Walcheren, with an intimation that she could support his son without his help, and that she wanted no hush money for her daughter’s misfortune. But she warned him that the curse of Heaven was on his marriage, and that it would come to no good, nor he either. When Frederick received this letter, he was on the eve of running away with Jenny Crampton, and, full of hope as he was, it still had the power to make him feel uncomfortable. But he had paid no heed to it. Rhoda Berry, in his estimation, was only a girl who had thrown herself into his arms, and he thought a hundred pounds was very handsome pay for his amusement. If the old woman wouldn’t take it, that wasn’t his fault. But he remembered it afterwards. He told both his cousin Philip and Father Tasker that, whilst he was bending in agony over the remains of his wife, he fancied he saw Rhoda Berry gibing at his misery, and rejoicing in it. It was the very last thing that poor Rhoda would have done; she had loved the _vaurien_ too well to take any pleasure in what troubled him, but his conscience told him he deserved her scorn, and so he fancied she gave it him. Poor Rhoda did not have a very good time with her mother after her baby’s birth, for Mrs Berry could not forgive her for having so totally disregarded all her warnings against the trouble that loomed in the future for her. There was not another girl in Luton, she declared, who would not have declined the London situation after what she had told her, but her daughter thought less of her prophecies than strangers did. Had she not laid the cards for her the very evening before she left home, and did she not warn her, as plainly as she could speak, to beware of a gentleman with dark eyes and hair, who would promise her all sorts of fine things, but would leave her with a curse upon her back. And hadn’t everything come to pass just as she had foretold, and wasn’t the curse sleeping in a cradle at their feet that moment, in the shape of a little boy, as black as a crow? It was the end of November by this time. Poor Jenny had been laid for months in her untimely grave, and Frederick Walcheren was hard at work studying for his ordination. Rhoda Berry had returned to her work of straw-plaiting at Luton, and everything went on the same in the cottage where her mother lived--except for the little child, and her subdued spirits.