"Are you going to heaven, too, Lydia?" he ventured. "With Anne?"
"I'm going everywhere my folks go," she said, with composure. "Now I can't talk any more. I told Mary Nellen I'd dust while they do the silver."
The atmosphere of a perfectly conventional living was about them. Jeffrey had to adjure himself to keep awake to the difficulties he alone had made. He had come out to confess to her the lawlessness of his mind toward her, and she was deciding merely to go on living with him and her father, which meant, in the first place, dusting for Mary Nellen. They walked along the orchard in silence, and Jeffrey, with relief, also took a side track to the obvious. Absently his eyes travelled along the orchard's level length, and his great thought came to him. The ground did it. The earth called to him. The dust rose up impalpably and spoke to him.
"Lydia," said he, "I see what to do."
"What?"
The startled brightness in her eyes told him she feared his thought, and, not knowing, as he did, how great it was, suspected him of tragic plans for going away.
"I'll go to work on this place. I'll plough it up. I'll raise things, and father and I'll dig."
As he watched her interrogatively the colour faded from her face. The relief of hearing that homespun plan had chilled her blood, and she was faint for an instant with the sickness of hearty youth that only knows it feels odd to itself and concludes the strangeness is of the soul. But she did not answer, for Anne was at the window, signalling.
"Come in," said Lydia. "She wants us."
Miss Amabel, in a morning elegance of black muslin and silk gloves, was in the library. Anne looked excited and the colonel, there also, quite pleasurably stirred. Lydia was hardly within the door when Anne threw the news at her.