“Who knows?” she asked, her face hardening.
“Mother, Becky, and ourselves.”
“Nobody else?”
“No.”
“Then it’s a good thing he is out of the way if he was such a nuisance to mother. Where is she?”
“Upstairs.”
Lettie ran to her.
CHAPTER V
THE SCENT OF BLOOD
The death of the man who was our father changed our lives. It was not that we suffered a great grief; the chief trouble was the unanswered crying of failure. But we were changed in our feelings and in our relations; there was a new consciousness, a new carefulness.
We had lived between the woods and the water all our lives, Lettie and I, and she had sought the bright notes in everything. She seemed to hear the water laughing, and the leaves tittering and giggling like young girls; the aspen fluttered like the draperies of a flirt, and the sound of the wood-pigeons was almost foolish in its sentimentality.