Why should Hetta interfere in this way, thought Susan to herself. Had she interfered when Mr. Beckard gave Hetta a testament bound in Morocco? Had not she smiled, and looked gratified, and kissed her sister, and declared that Phineas Beckard was a nice dear man, and by far the most elegant preacher at the Springs? Why should Hetta be so cruel?
“I don’t see that, my dear,” said the mother. Hetta would not explain before her sister, so they all went to bed.
On the Thursday evening the drawing was finished. Not a word had been said about it, at any rate in his presence, and he had gone on working in silence. “There,” said he, late on the Thursday evening, “I don’t know that it will be any better if I go on daubing for another hour. There, Miss Susan; there’s another bridge. I hope that will neither burst with the frost, nor yet be destroyed by fire,” and he gave it a light flip with his fingers and sent it skimming over the table.
Susan blushed and smiled, and took it up. “Oh, it is beautiful,” she said. “Isn’t it beautifully done, mother?” and then all the three got up to look at it, and all confessed that it was excellently done.
“And I am sure we are very much obliged to you,” said Susan after a pause, remembering that she had not yet thanked him.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” said he, not quite liking the word “we.”
On the following day he returned from his work to Saratoga about noon. This he had never done before, and therefore no one expected that he would be seen in the house before the evening. On this occasion, however, he went straight thither, and as chance would have it, both the widow and her elder daughter were out. Susan was there alone in charge of the house.
He walked in and opened the parlour door. There she sat, with her feet on the fender, with her work unheeded on the table behind her, and the picture, Aaron’s drawing, lying on her knees. She was gazing at it intently as he entered, thinking in her young heart that it possessed all the beauties which a picture could possess.
“Oh, Mr. Dunn,” she said, getting up and holding the tell-tale sketch behind the skirt of her dress.
“Miss Susan, I have come here to tell your mother that I must start for New York this afternoon and be there for six weeks, or perhaps longer.”