“Yes, we did a good deal of sight-seeing together,” said Kate, and then she added hurriedly, “he and Stella are tremendously up in art, and that’s why he went to some places with us. He wanted to show her a picture in his own house for one thing. Maybe Esther wrote you about that too.”
“But he knows Stella’s gone from your grandfather’s now, doesn’t he?” said the young man. There were apparently other things besides the price of turkeys in regard to which he could draw quick deductions, and his eyes searched Kate’s at that moment with a look that was straight and keen.
“I don’t know but he does,” she said almost pettishly.
There was a minute’s silence, and somehow it occurred to Morton Elwell just then that the hour was growing late.
“I must be going home,” he said. “Aunt Jenny’ll wonder what has become of me.”
He said good night to Virgie, and stopped in the hall a minute for a word with Mrs. Northmore. Kate was beside him. “I’ll go down to the gate with you,” she said, as she had said many a time before, and he seemed to expect it.
But when they were fairly beyond the porch, in the shadows of the shrubbery, he slipped his arm through hers, and said very quietly: “Kate, I wish you’d tell me the truth about this Mr. Hadley. He’s coming to see Esther, of course. Is he in love with her?”
“I don’t know that he is. I never saw a thing to make me think so,” said Kate, with low vehemence. And then (for there was a frankness in her which would not let her stop there) she added: “Tom says he is; but Tom made up his mind to that right at the start, and he’s the most obstinate boy I ever saw about his own opinions. He never changes his mind, no matter what good reasons you may show him on the other side.”
The idiosyncrasies of Tom Saxon were not interesting just then to Morton Elwell. Kate heard him draw his breath hard before he said: “Of course he’s in love with her. He’s been seeing her all summer, and he couldn’t help being. And she”—he paused for an instant before he added bitterly: “I understand it now. It’s knowing him that made her so willing to stay.”
“Oh, no it isn’t, Mort; indeed it isn’t,” said Kate, bringing him to a standstill with a compelling pressure on his arm. “If you knew everything, you wouldn’t say that. It was Aunt Katharine that made her stay. Oh, if you knew Aunt Katharine! She’s a dreadfully strong-minded woman, and she’s taken a terrible fancy to Esther. She’d like to make her feel just as she does about woman’s rights, and never marrying, and all that sort of thing. She’s the one, not Mr. Hadley at all, that has such an influence over Esther.”