“You mean I’m really more like you?” Henrietta said. “Am I? I’m like my father,” and she added softly, “terribly.”
Henrietta moved her feet. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“He was queer. You said we all were, and I’m a Mallett, too, that’s all. Don’t you think we ought to go and see about the dresses now? Aunt Rose, they’re bothering me to wear white, the only thing for a young girl, but I want to wear yellow. Don’t you think I might?”
Rose, who had felt herself on the brink of confidences, as though she peered over a cliff, and watched the mists clear to show the secret valley underneath, now saw the clouds thicken hopelessly, and retreated from her position with an effort.
“Yellow? Yes, certainly. You will look like a marigold. Henrietta—” She did not know what she was going to say, but she wanted to detain the girl for a little longer, she hoped for another chance of drawing nearer. “Henrietta, wait a minute.” She moved to her dressing-table, smiling at what she was about to do. It seemed as though she were going to bribe the girl to love her, but she was only yielding to the pathetic human desire to give something tangible since the intangible was ignored. “When I was twenty-one,” she said, “your father gave me a present.”
“Well,” Rose excused him, “we didn’t know each other very well. He was a great deal from home, but he remembered my twenty-first birthday and he gave me this necklace. I think it’s beautiful, but I never wear it now, and I think you may like to have it. Here it is, in its own box and with the card he wrote—‘A jewel for a rose.’”
Holding it in her cupped hands, Henrietta murmured with delight: “May I have it really? How lovely! And may I have the card, too? He did say nice things. Are you sure you can spare the card? I expect he admired you very much. He liked beautiful women. My mother was pretty, too; but I don’t believe he ever gave her anything except a wedding-ring, and he had to give her that.”
“Oh, Henrietta—well, his daughter shall have all he gave me.”
“If you’re sure you don’t want it. What are the stones?”
“Topaz and diamonds; but so small that you can wear them.”
“Topaz and diamonds! Oh!” And Henrietta, clasping it round her neck and surveying herself by the candles Rose had lighted, said earnestly, “Oh, I do hope he paid for it!” This was the first thought of Reginald Mallett’s daughter.