Lydia rose from where she knelt by the bed. Her chin was quivering. “Why, you make me feel so—so queer! Both of you!—As though it were anything—to see Paul—when I’ve known him always.”
Her mother seized on the rôle opened to them by this speech, and said quickly: “Why, of course! Aren’t we silly! I don’t know what possesses us. When he comes you just run along and see him, and say your father and I are sorry not to be there.”
During the next half-hour she made every effort, heroically though obviously seconded by her husband, to keep the conversation in a light and casual vein, but when the door-bell rang, they all three heard it with a start. Mrs. Emery said, very carelessly, “There he is, dear. Run along and remember me to him.” But she pulled Lydia down to her, straightened a bow on her waist with a twitch, loosened a lock of the girl’s shining dark hair, and kissed her with a sudden yearning fervor.
After they were alone, Judge Emery laughed aloud. “You’re just as bad as I am, Sarah. You don’t say anything, but—”
“Oh, I know,” his wife said; “I can’t help it!” She deliberated unresignedly over the situation for a moment, and then, “It seems as though I couldn’t have it so, to be sick just now, when I’m needed so much. This first month is so important! And Lydia’s getting such a different idea of things from what I meant, having this awful time with servants, and all. I have a sort of feeling once in a while that she’s getting notions!” She pronounced the word darkly.
“Notions?” Judge Emery asked. He had never learned to interpret his wife’s obscurities when the mantle of intuitions fell on her.
“Oh, don’t ask me what kind! I don’t know. If I knew I could do something about it. But she speaks queerly once in a while, and the evening of the day she was out with Marietta in the Black Rock woods she was— Do you know, I think it’s not good for Lydia to be outdoors too much. It seems to go to her head so. She gets to looking like Harry—almost reckless, and like some little scampering wild animal.”
Judge Emery rose and buttoned his coat about his spare figure. “Maybe she takes a back track, after some of my folks. You know there’s one line in my mother’s family that was always crazy about the woods. My grandfather on my mother’s side used to go off just as regular as the month of May came around, and—”
Mrs. Emery interrupted him with the ruthless and justifiable impatience of people at the family history of their relations by marriage. “Oh, go along! And stop and speak to Paul on your way out. Just drop in as you pass the door. We don’t want to really chaperone her. Nobody does that yet—but—the Hollisters are so formal about their girls—well, you stop in, anyhow. It’s borne in on me that that’ll look better, after all.”