"I know it is asking a good deal, but it would make me so happy, so comfortable."
"And you are such a dear little thing!"
"Do you really think so? Oh, if you could care about me," and the entreaty in the voice touches the heart of the elder as nothing has in a long while.
"I will go," returns Gertrude, with unwonted decision. "I will be quick about changing my dress. There is the carriage."
Gertrude is not much improved by her mourning. She looks less deathly and washed out in the soft white gowns, but there is a languid grace about her that, after all, moves the professor's sympathy. "It is a better face than the other one," he thinks; "not so silly and self-sufficient." He is ever entertaining, unless deeply preoccupied, and now he addresses most of his conversation to her, and is friendly solicitous about her comfort and her health. "There are such delightful baths in Germany. Is there nothing like them in America?" he asks.
"They are really so," Gertrude answers. "We were in Germany once, when my health first began to break."
"In Germany?" With that he brightens up and questions her, and Violet is pleased that she answers with interest. She so pities poor Gertrude, with her broken-off love story, and she helps the conversation with now and then a trenchant bit of her own that does not lead it away. She is so generous in this respect. She has not come to the time of life when one wishes to amass, or is it that she has not seen anything she covets?
The professor is satisfied with every room. If they can put in a bed he will sleep here, and take this for his workroom. The parlor is still left for the entertainment of guests. Here is a porch and a rather steep flight of steps, where he can run up and down when he wants a whiff of the cool river breeze or a stroll along the shore. Violet explains to Denise that Prof. Freilgrath will want some meals. "You know all about those odd foreign soups and dishes," she says, with her pretty air. "And I shall come over every day to write or to read. You can't think what a business woman I have become."
Denise raises her eyebrows a little. "And Mr. Grandon?" she asks.
"Oh, I expect he will never want to come back home! Denise, wouldn't it be lovely if we lived here, with Cecil? I wish he might want to," in her incoherent eagerness. "It will be another home to us, you see, where I shall feel quite free. Why, I could even come in the kitchen and cook a dish!"