Their thoughts went on different journeys, and his were so absorbing that, when he halted at his next remark, he had forgotten how easily she might trace his route.
"I hope you will meet Alexander some day," he said. Then he flushed guiltily, and, with a pitiful attempt at carelessness, began to hum untunefully.
Her words came instinctively, like an arm raised against a blow. "Oh, I expect I shall." The next moment, she could marvel at the readiness with which she had spoken, in spite of her stiffened body and the lump of revolt in her throat.
She lay very still, but her heart was thudding and, as though with the glow of her father's blush, her face was crimsoned; but soon it faltered into white and her lips trembled. The quality of her anger brought her near tears, and a great pity for herself surrounded her like air. Was she a chattel to be proffered in hope of sale? she asked silently, and that brought pride to drive back her weeping. She sat up with a beautiful, strong lift of her back. Pride was her strength. It enabled her to deceive her father.
"Shall we go on?" she said, and smiled, so that he thought she had not understood, and was thankful. She saw care visibly lifted from him, and her heart was tender for him. Was he not true to his own advice, and did not all his actions speak of love? She could not blame him since he loved her, thought her incomparable, and said so, through his eyes.
She linked her arm in his, but her rage against Alexander was red-hot.
[CHAPTER XVIII]
On the evening of the next day, James Rutherford was not at supper. Theresa had been warned of his peculiarities, and she readily obeyed a hint that she should go early to bed; but she went reluctantly, for she grudged missing any new experience, and she lay, reading by candlelight, while the voices of her father and Clara rose, and died away, and rose again.
She had taken the book from Alexander's shelves. It was the Keats her father had given him. She saw their two names and the date, and for an instant she held it close. The feel of it produced a vision of her childhood as in a pictured show. She saw herself standing by her father before the breakfast-room fire, listening to that tale of how he was lost among the mountains. That was the day on which they had become part of her life, and when, indissolubly united to them, she had first heard of Alexander. Black-haired boy with the solemn face, clattering about the yard among the geese, he had been stamped on her eager brain, never to be removed. She would keep that old memory, lovingly, for her childhood's sake, and she could feel tender towards the book which she carried into bed, without doing violence to her cherished independence.