“Yes,” said Babbie, plaintively, but she did not think she would. How could she, and he so cold, so prosaic! She went out into the snow, which was driving down Main Street from the Institute. It was four by the town clock.
They said in Wimberton that Mr. Solley left his house at seven o'clock in the evening, and that Stephen, the gardener, held an umbrella in front of him to keep off the storm all the way up the hill to the Institute. And they said, too, that the lights were left burning in the Solley house, and the fire on the hearth, and that the book he was reading when Babbie went in lay open on the table. The fire burned itself out. Stephen came in late, closed the book, and put out the lights, and in the morning went about town saying that Mr. Solley was to enter the Institute as a beneficiary.
But it is a secret that on that snowy evening Mr. Solley and Miss Lucia sat in the great east parlor of the Institute, with a lamp near by, but darkness in all the distances about them. His hands were on his gold-headed cane; Miss Lucia's rolls of white curls were very tidy over her ears, and her fingers were knitting something placidly. She was saying it was “quite impossible. One doesn't want to be absurd at seventy-five.”
“I suppose not,” said Mr. Solley. “I shouldn't mind it. What do you think of the other plan?”
“If you want my permission to be a beneficiary,” said Miss Lucia, with her eyes twinkling, “I think it would be a proper humiliation for you. I think you deserve it.”
“It would be no humiliation.”
“It was for me—some.”
“It shall be so no more. I'll make them wish they were all old enough to do the same—hem—confound them!”
“Did you think of it that way, John?”
Mr. Solley was silent for some moments.