Mather also had occasion to smile thus, when one day he allowed Beth Blanchard's word of advice to move him at last. He had seen Ellis more than once in Chebasset, and felt uneasy; Pease looked in one afternoon and asked him to go up to the Blanchards'. As usual, Mather refused, but after an hour he started up the hill, to be passed by Pease coming down. They were on different ways, for Mather had just left the high road for a path which would save distance, when looking back he saw Pease going down the hill. Pease wore a flower which he had not had before; he was smiling cheerfully, with a retrospective air, and Mather smiled also, grimly as Miss Cynthia had done, at the thought of the late plant of love springing in the barren soil of middle-age.
He went on to the Blanchards' house; Judith was not there. But Beth welcomed him and sat him down, gave him tea, and talked to him as he sat half-silent.
"People do not see much of you nowadays," she said with a tone of reproach. "You are much too busy, George."
"Oh, well——!" he shrugged inattentively, and Beth might interpret as she pleased. She looked at him as he sat, with his chair against the piazza railing, his arm across it, and his face turned to look out upon the bay. He was neither gloomy nor resigned, but bore the look of a strong man waiting. Time was not of account to him.
"You do not worry much," she said.
"Not I," he answered, but he turned to her. "Is there anything to worry about, little Beth?"
"Sometimes I think so," she replied. "I think that now you'd better stay to dinner."
"Thank you," he said, looking at her more carefully. "I suppose you know best," he added.
There had never been anything between these two except undefined good-feeling, expressed only by the inattentive conversation of those who have often met in the same house with different interests. There had existed, besides, that consciousness of a difference in age which makes a few years seem almost a generation, so that with boys and girls "sets" are separated by a bar of habit which prevents an older from seeing anything in a younger, even after the passage of years has brought them both to maturity. Thus, to Mather, Beth had always been a little girl, until just now her quiet, assured carriage, as she interfered in his affairs, opened his eyes. For she answered his last remark with confidence.
"Yes, I know best." And he believed her.