'There, I told you!' said the old lady. 'Norah, don't go to these places any more. You have begun to covet them in your heart.'
'Oh, how beautiful mamma would look in them!' cried Norah. 'Mr Stephen, is it vanity to admire one's mother? I suppose it must be really; for if there is anything in the world that belongs to you, of course it is your mother. I think mamma is beautiful: even in her black silk, made square, and not so fresh as it once was, she was the most beautiful in the room--I don't mean pretty, like us girls. And if I could have put her into black velvet instead, with lovely lace, like Mrs Burton's, and the Marchioness's diamonds--oh!' cried Norah, expanding in her proud imagination, 'she would have been like a queen!'
'Oh, Norah, Norah!' cried Mrs Haldane, shaking her head.
'And so she would,' said Stephen. 'Norah is quite right.'
He spoke low, and there was a melancholy tone in his voice. He was thinking sadly how she had been buried like himself in the middle of her days--shut out from all those triumphs and glories which are pleasant to a woman. A less human-hearted man in Stephen Haldane's position would no doubt have pronounced it happy for Helen that she was thus preserved from vanity and vain-glory. But he had learned to feel for all the deprivations of life. This was what he was really thinking, but not what he was supposed to think. Miss Jane gave a glance of her eye at him from her sewing, half-indignant, half-sorrowful. She had fancied something of the sort often, she said to herself. Stephen, poor Stephen! who could never have a wife, or any other love different from her own. She thought that the other woman whom she had admitted in all the confidence of friendship had stolen from him her brother's heart.
'Well, and if she had,' said Miss Jane, with some sharpness, 'what good would that have done her? I never heard that to be like a queen made anybody the happier yet.'
'I was not thinking of what made her happier,' said Norah, coming behind Miss Jane's chair, and stealing an arm round her neck, 'but of what would make _me_ happier. Shouldn't you like to have everything that was nice for Mrs Haldane and Mr Stephen, even if they didn't want it? Oh, I know you would! and so should I.'