This retreat was cut short by his next speech. “Oh, I’ve just come from your father. I went to his office, thinking you might be there. He said to tell you and your mother that he won’t be home to dinner to-night at all. He’s got some citations on hand he has to verify.”
Lydia had stopped her actual recoil at his first words and now stood still, but she still tugged at the invisible chain which held her. She was panting a little. She shook her head. “Well—anyhow—I want to see him!” she insisted with a transparently aimless obstinacy like a frightened child’s. “I want to see my father.” Paul laughed easily, “Well, you’d better choose some other time if you want to get anything out of him. He had turned everybody out and was just settling to work with a pile of law-books before him. You know how your father looks under those circumstances!” He held the picture up to her, relentlessly smiling.
Lydia’s lips quivered, but she said nothing.
Paul went on soothingly, “I’ve only come to take you straight home, anyhow. Your mother wants you. She said she had one of those fainting turns again. She said to be sure to bring you.”
At the mention of her mother’s name, Lydia turned quite pale. She began to walk slowly back towards the wagon. There was angry, helpless misery in her dark eyes, but there was no longer any resistance. “Oh, if Mother needs me—” she murmured. She took the offered hand, stepped into the wagon and even went through some fitful pretense of responding to the chorus of facetious good-bys which rose from the group they were leaving.
She said little or nothing in answer to the young man’s kind, cheerful talk, as they drove along one main thoroughfare after another, conspicuous by the brilliant, prosperous beauty of their well-fed youth and their handsome garb, pointed out by people on the sidewalks, constantly nodding in response to greetings from acquaintances. Lydia flushed deeply at the first of these salutations, a flush which grew deeper and deeper as these features of their processional advance repeated themselves. She put her hand to her throat from time to time as though it ached and when the red rubber-tired wheels turned noiselessly in on the asphalt of her home street, she threw the lap-robe brusquely back from her knees as though for an instant escape.
The young man’s pleasant chat stopped. “Look here, Lydia,” he said in another tone, one that forced her eyes to meet his, “look here, don’t you forget one thing!” His voice was deep with the sincerest sympathy, his eyes full of emotion, “Don’t you forget, little Lydia, that nobody’s sorrier for you than I am! And I don’t want anything that—” he cried out in sudden passion—“Good Lord, I’d be cut to bits before I’d even want anything that wasn’t best for you!” He looked away and mastered himself again to quiet friendliness, “You know that, don’t you, Lydia? You know that all I want is for you to have the most successful life anyone can?”
He leaned to her imploring in his turn.
She drew a quick breath, and moved her head from side to side restlessly. Then drawn by the steady insistence of his eyes, she said, as if touched by his patient, determined kindness, “Oh, yes, yes, Paul, I realize how awfully good you’re being to me! I wish I could—but—yes, of course I see how good you are to me!”
He laid his hand an instant over hers, withdrawing it before she herself could make the action. “It makes me happy to have you know I want to be,” he said simply, “now that’s all. You needn’t be afraid. I shan’t bother you.”