They turned toward the house, and the judge took his wife’s arm, leaning rather heavily on it.
“Will!” she said, after they had gone a few steps in this fashion. “What is the matter with you! You walk like an old man!”
She shook his arm off, and said:
“Hurry up now. The coffee will be getting cold.”
Indoors, they passed Connie going through the hall; she had just come down the stairs, and the sight of her girlish figure, and her short skirts just sweeping the tops of her shoes, gladdened the judge’s heart, and he smiled. He could rely on Connie, anyway, for sympathy. But the girl gave him a sharp reproachful stare from her dark eyes, and the judge felt utterly deserted.
Lavinia did not come down to her supper, though her mother, knowing she would want it later, kept the coffee warm on the back of the kitchen stove. Chad had gone away with one of the Weston boys. So the three, the judge, Mrs. Blair and Connie, ate their supper alone.
After supper, Mrs. Blair and Connie went immediately to Lavinia and the judge had a sense of exclusion from the mysteries that were enacting up there, an exclusion that seemed to proceed from his own culpability. He went to his library and tried to read, but he could only sit with his head in his hand, and stare before him. But finally he was aroused from his reveries by a stir in the hall, and glancing up he saw Lavinia in the door. She came straight to him, and said:
“Forgive me, papa, if I was rude and unkind.”
He seized her in his arms, hugging her head against his shoulders, and he said again and again, while stroking her hair clumsily:
“My little girl! My little girl!”