“I am only afraid, dear,” Mrs. Blair said quietly, “that we have taken this thing too seriously.”
“Possibly,” he said. “But it is serious, very serious. I don’t know what is to be done.”
“We must have patience,” Mrs. Blair counseled. “It will require all our delicacy and tact, now.”
“Perhaps you had better go in to her,” the judge said presently. “Poor little girl; she is passing through the deep waters. And I tried to act only for her interest and happiness.”
Mrs. Blair arose.
“She will see that, dear, in time.”
“I hope so,” said the judge. Mrs. Blair went up to Lavinia’s room, and listened for a moment at the closed door. She heard a voice, low and indistinct, but she knew it for the voice of Connie, and she could tell from its tone that the little girl was trying in her way to comfort and console her sister. So she stepped away, silently, almost stealthily, going on tiptoe.
The judge sat on the veranda all the afternoon. He scarcely moved, and never once did he pick up the Sunday paper. Now and then he bowed, in his dignified way, to some acquaintance passing in the street. The Chenowiths came out on to their front porch, evidently hot and stupefied from their Sunday afternoon naps and ready now for the cool refreshment of the evening breeze they could usually rely on in Macochee with the coming of the evening. The judge bowed to them, and he tried to put into his bow an indolent unconcern, lest the Chenowiths should penetrate his manner and discover the trouble that lay on his heart. The Chenowiths had gone to the end of their porch, and the judge could hear their laughter. He thought it strange and unnatural that any one should laugh.
He decided that he would review this whole affair of Lavinia’s love calmly and judicially. He went back to the beginning of Marley’s visit, trying to see wherein he himself had been in the wrong, then he went over the hot scene with Lavinia. He could not recover from his surprise at this; that Lavinia, who was usually so gentle, so mild, so unselfish, should have given way to such anger was incomprehensible. He had always said that she had her mother’s disposition. He could see her, all the time, distinctly, as she had stood there, in a rage he had never known her to indulge before, and yet, as he looked at the image of her that was in his mind, and recalled certain expressions, certain attitudes, certain tones of voice, it came over him all at once that she was exactly as her mother had been at her age, though he could not reconcile Lavinia’s mood with the resemblance. Then he went back to his own days of courtship, with their emotions, their uncertainties, their doubts and illusions. They seemed a long way off.
He was trying to think calmly and logically, but he found that he could not then control his mind, for suddenly he saw Lavinia as a little girl, with her mother kneeling before her, shaking out and straightening her starched frock. And with this thought came the revelation, sudden, irresistible, that Lavinia was no longer a child as, with the habit of the happy years, he had thought of her, up to that very afternoon, in fact, until an hour ago, and he bowed before the changes that hour had wrought. He accepted the conviction now that he himself had grown old. He forgot his purpose to probe to its first cause this unhappiness that had come to him; he saw that what he mourned was the loss of a child, the loss of his own youth.