He gazed benevolently at the scrubby pastures, and the creek where the small boys were shooting bullfrogs with rubber slings.
Camilla felt a certain vagueness of interest, and vaguely reproached herself. What was Alcott Aidee doing? Had his brother escaped? What was this dreadful brother like who would drag him away? But Alcott might come to the Champney house that afternoon. He might be there now. She must go back. He did not care for parks and boulevards and bridges. He loved the people, and sacrificed himself for the people, and he was going away, and did not know where it all would lead him. What did it matter whether or not one made a lawn in place of a pasture lot? But it must be wrong not to be interested in what Dick did and planned, or what her father said about it. She forced herself to answer and smile. Henry Champney was too busy unfolding his ideas to notice that her thoughts were absent. But Camilla noticed how Dick's doings, sayings, and plans seemed to occupy her father's mind of late.
“A noble thought, a worthy ambition,” Champney rumbled.
So they drove from the Park, Champney muttering and booming, Camilla wrapped in a crowd of uncertain fears and cravings. Through this cloud came the half-distinguished pain of feeling that her father could feel it possible to lean on anyone but herself, and find a wide passage through someone else than her to his fine victory over old age. It was through Dick, and of course, that made it more natural, but it hurt her.
She must find Aidee now. If his brother had escaped, it would be in the afternoon papers.
When they reached home she jumped out and ran up the steps, while her father drove on to the stable. She picked up the paper that lay on the porch, thrown in by the passing newsboy, who was skilful to deliver papers without getting off his bicycle. She went upstairs, and did not look at the paper till she reached the store-room.
Henry Champney came into the library, where Miss Eunice was sitting. A half hour slipped by.
“That boy!” rumbled Henry Champney to Miss Eunice in his library; “that superlative procrastination! that acme of mental, moral, and physical ineptitude! Ha! Why doesn't he bring my paper? On my word, five o'clock! Five o'clock! Does he expect me to get up in the middle of the night to read it? Nonsense! I won't do it!”
Miss Eunice shook her head gloomily, implying that not much was to be expected of this generation. Richard, she said, had been in to see Camilla. He had been very unsatisfactory and distrait. He had said that he would come in again before teatime. No one else had called. She was of the opinion that Richard was worried. It was not proper for young people, when their elders were speaking, were giving important advice—it was not considerate or well-bred of them to look vague, to answer only that it was four o'clock, and they would come back to tea, when neither statement was important. The paper boy's rough manner of throwing the paper on the porch she had never approved of.
They were still on the subject when Camilla's step was heard in the hall. Instead of coming into the library she went swiftly out of the front door. Miss Eunice, at the window, dropped her knitting.