She clung to him, whispering, and he kissed her.
I stole away. Oh! my injured, innocent mother. I do not remember exactly what I did. I rushed from the house out into the great fir wood and wept out my hot, rebellious anger and despair there. At breakfast time the next morning just a gleam of hope came to me. Miss Reinhart said that, above everything else, she should like a drive.
Whether it was my pleading and tears or the rector's visit which had made my father think, I cannot tell, but for the first time he seemed quite unwilling to drive her out. The tears came into her eyes and he went over to her and whispered something which made her smile. He talked to her in a mysterious kind of fashion that I could neither understand nor make out at all—of some time in the future.
An uneasy sense of something about to happen came over me. I could feel the approach of some dark shadow; all day the same sensation rested with me, yet I saw nothing to justify it. At night my mother called me to her side.
"Laura, you do not look so cheerful this evening. What makes my daughter so sad?"
I could not tell her of that scene I had witnessed; I could not tell her of what was wrong.
On the morning following this, to me, horrible day, I could not help seeing that there was quite a new understanding between my father and Miss Reinhart. I overheard him say to her:
"It would have been quite impossible to have gone on; the whole country would have been in an uproar."
All that day there seemed to me something mysterious going on in the house; the servants went about with puzzled faces; there were whisperings and consultations. I heard Patience say to Emma:
"It is not true. I would not believe it. It is some foolish exaggeration of the servants. I am sure it is not true."