The woman’s youngest son, a boy of sixteen, met her at the cottage door, and led her into the small, neat sitting room, saying he would call his mother. He disappeared, and Rosalind looked, superciliously, about the small apartment with its dingy furnishings, muttering: “I would rather die than be poor and shabby. I declare I don’t see how very poor folks endure such an existence. Ah, what----” the sentence ended abruptly, and getting up with a swish of trailing silk and flutter of rich laces, she swept across the room to a new easel standing in a corner with a good-sized picture upon it, representing a group of two--a picturesque group of two lovers, a handsome man, a lovely white-gowned girl, standing, hand in hand, amid tropical shrubbery. Rosalind gazed with idle curiosity a moment, then her eyes flashed, and a keen, bitter pain stabbed her jealous heart like the point of a dagger. The picture was a large, framed photograph of Charley Bonair and Berry that they had sent to Mrs. Vining months before. The beauty and the happiness of the handsome pair struck Rosalind’s heart with bitterness, but while she gazed the mother’s voice said, just behind her: “Ah, Miss Montague, you’re admiring the picture of my little girl and her husband. It’s the image of Berry, bless her dear heart, don’t you think so, miss? She sent it to me a while ago, and oh, how glad I am the dear girl is happily married! But I beg pardon, can I do anything for you, Miss Montague?” “I am to be married soon, you know, Mrs. Vining, to Senator Bonair, and some of my simpler things are being done at home by seamstresses. Mamma sent me to ask if you will come and help finish up, next week? She will pay you more than you can earn at the tailor shop.” “But I am not at the tailor shop now, Miss Montague.” “Indeed? Have they discharged you, then?” insolently. “Oh, no, miss; I left of my own accord. I’m getting to be an old woman now, and must rest for the balance of my life.” Rosalind looked more closely, and noted a more prosperous air about Berry’s mother than she had ever seen before. “I do not understand how you expect to live without work,” she said sharply. “It does seem strange to you, doesn’t it now, Miss Montague, seeing how I have been working and toiling here all my life? My son-in-law, out of his good heart, has sent me a present of a thousand dollars to take my ease on, and says there’s more to come when I have spent it all.” “So then you will not come to sew?” Rosalind exclaimed sneeringly. “No, Miss Montague. I’d rather not, thank you all the same for giving me the chance if I needed it, but Berry wrote I mustn’t work any more.” “I’ll go, then,” Rosalind cried, with an angry flirt of her skirts that tumbled the picture off the easel and splintered the glass over it; while with a smothered, malicious laugh at what she had done through pure spitefulness, she swept from the house, leaving the old woman busy gathering up the fragments.