As the days went on—the days before the letter came from home which finally settled the question—she grew restless and depressed. Even the disputes with Tom fell off, and he rallied her sometimes on her lack of spirit.
“I believe it’s the notion of going West again that makes you so down in the mouth, for all you pretend you’re so keen to go,” he said to her once, as they were tramping home in the late afternoon from the wood-lot, where they had gone in search of sassafras.
She tossed her head. “You know better,” she said, “and between ourselves and the post you aren’t so very lively yourself lately. I believe you’d like to go home with me and grow up with the West a while.”
They exchanged a good-natured laugh. There was no denying that there were moments when the thought of parting with his cousin Kate really depressed Tom Saxon. She had the next word, and she said it with unaffected seriousness.
“Honestly, Tom, I don’t know what ails me. If I could have a good out-and-out cry I believe I could get over it; but there isn’t anything really to cry about. I’ll tell you how I do sometimes at home, when I feel blue. I get down Dickens, and read, the death of little Nell, or how they killed Sydney Carton, or something awfully harrowing like that, you know, and then I have it out and feel better. But you haven’t got Dickens here,” she added ruefully.
“Grandfather’s got Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’” said Tom, grinning, and then he added, in a tone of curiosity, “Do you cry over books?” It was a feminine weakness which he had not suspected of Kate.
“Cry!” she repeated. “Yes, I do; and I don’t care who knows it. I’ll tell you how I got through ‘Nicholas Nickleby.’ It used me up so every time I read how Squeers treated those poor fellows in his school that I couldn’t stand it. Well, I knew he got his come-up-ance from Nicholas in the end, so every time I read one of those mean places, I’d just turn ahead and read how Nicholas flogged him. I reckon I must have read that scene a dozen times before I fairly came to it, and it did me more good every time. I believe that story would have killed me if I hadn’t.”
There was plenty of fight in Kate. Tom had known that for some time. That there were tears, too, need not have surprised any one but a boy, and he liked her none the less for it. She gave a long sigh, and came back to her own troubles. The sympathetic tone in which Tom said, “I wish I could do something for you,” was a comfort in itself, and the need of talking to some one drew her on.
“Right down at the bottom of it, Tom, I suppose it’s the thought of going home without Esther; and yet it isn’t because I hate to leave her behind. I shall miss her, of course; but I could stand that. She was off at school a whole year and I didn’t pine for her so dreadfully much. But—but it’s Aunt Katharine! Tom, I can’t bear to have Esther get so intimate with Aunt Katharine.”
She had actually said it now, and for the rest of the way home she poured out her heart with a girlish freedom. Perhaps her feelings grew more clear to herself as she tried to make them plain to him. He understood better than she expected, and fully agreed with her as to the undesirability of Aunt Katharine’s “making a slave of Esther”; but he thought her fears on this point much exaggerated, and it was good advice that he gave her as they neared the house.