"I know," he said, wringing my hand. "I wish I could heap blessings on the head of the exception. Now let us go in."
The next day we rode down to Beyrout, and took the steamer that same evening.
My Palestine holiday lasted, in some measure, all the way of our journey home; and left me at the very moment when we entered our Parisian hotel and met mamma. It left me then. All the air of the place, much more all the style of mamma's dress and manner, said at once that we had come into another world. She was exquisitely dressed; that was usual; it could not have been only that, nor the dainty appointments around her; - it was something in her bearing, an indescribable something even as she greeted us, which said, You have played your play - now you will play mine. And it said, I cannot tell how, The cards are in my hands.
Company engaged her that evening. I saw little of her till the next day. At our late breakfast then we discussed many things. Not much of Palestine; mamma did not want to hear much of that. She had had it in our letters, she said. American affairs were gone into largely; with great eagerness and bitterness by both mamma and Aunt Gary; with triumphs over the disasters of the Union army before Richmond, and other lesser affairs in which the North had gained no advantage; invectives against the President's July proclamation, his impudence and his cowardice; and prophecies of ruin to him and his cause. Papa listened and said little. I heard and was silent; with throbbing forebodings of trouble.
"Daisy is handsomer than ever," my aunt remarked, when even politics had exhausted themselves. But I wondered what she was thinking of when she said it. Mamma lifted her eyes and glanced me over.
"Daisy has a rival, newly appeared," she said. "She must do her best."
"There cannot be rivalry, mamma, where there is no competition," I said.
"Cannot there?" said mamma. "You never told us, Daisy, of _your_ successes in the North."
I do not think I flushed at all in answer to this remark; the blood seemed to me to go all to my heart.
"Who has been Daisy's trumpeter?" papa asked.
"There is a friend of hers here," mamma said, slowly sipping her coffee. I do not know how I sat at the table; things seemed to swim in a maze before my eyes; then mamma went on, - "What have you done with your victim, Daisy?"