Book account

I think she has the loveliest
face I ever saw, with one exception," and he looked straight at the
young girl whom he had wounded, hoping this implied compliment might
atone.
But if Bessie heard or understood him she made no sign, and sat with her
hands locked tightly together and her eyes looking far away across the
sea of heads and the rapidly moving line of carriages.
This man knew her mother at her worst--not sweet, loving and kind as she
was sometimes at Stoneleigh, but as a gambler, an adventuress, a woman
of whom men jested and made sport--a woman who had probably ensured and
fleeced him, as Neil would have expressed it. Bessie knew all the
miserable catalogue of expedients resorted to by her mother to extort
money from her victims; cards, chess, bets, philopenas, loans she never
intended to pay, and which she accepted as gifts the instant the offer
was made, and when these failed, pitiful tales of scanty means and
pressing needs, an invalid husband at home, and a daughter who must be
supported.


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