He looked at Lydia penetratingly. She had taken a chair before the soft-coal fire and was staring at it rather moodily. “Well, Lydia, my dear, and how does Endbury strike you now? Speaking of many tastes, what are yours going to be like, I wonder?”
“I wonder,” she repeated absently.
“Well, at least you know whether the young man who called on you last night is to your taste?”
Lydia turned her face away and made a nervous gesture. “Oh, don’t, Godfather!”
“Very well, I won’t,” he said cheerfully, turning to his books with the instinct of one who knows his womankind.
There was a long silence, broken only by the purring of the coal. Then Lydia gave a laugh and went to sit on the arm of his chair. “Of course that was what I came to see you about,” she admitted, her sensitive lips quivering into a smile that was not light-hearted; “but now I’m here I find I haven’t anything to say. Perhaps you’d better give me a pink pill and send me home to forget all about everything.”
Dr. Melton took her fingers and held them closely in his thin, sinewy hands. “Oh, if I could—if I only could do something for you!” He searched her face anxiously. “What did young Hollister say that makes you so troubled?”
She sat down on the edge of his writing-table and reflected. “It wasn’t anything he said,” she admitted. “He was all right, I guess. Father had scared the life out of me before he came, by sort of taking it for granted—Oh, you know—the silly way people do—”
“Yes.”
“Well, Paul was as nice as could be about that, so far as words go— He didn’t say a thing embarrassing or—or hard to answer, but he let me see—all the same! He kept saying what an immense help I’d be to an ambitious man. He said he didn’t see why I shouldn’t grow into the leader of Endbury society, like the Mrs. Hollister, his aunt, that he and his sister live with, you know.”