“And you’ll write to me regularly, Treeshy—long long letters? I may count on that, mayn’t I, wherever I am? And they must all be numbered, every one of them, so that I shall know at once if I’ve missed one; remember!”
“And, Lewis, you’ll wear them here?” (She touched his breast.) “Oh, not all,” she added, laughing, “for they’d make such a big bundle that you’d soon have a hump in front like Pulcinella—but always at least the last one, just the last one. Promise!”
“Always, I promise—as long as they’re kind,” he said, still struggling to take a spirited line.
“Oh, Lewis, they will be, as long as yours are—and long long afterward....”
Venus failed and vanished in the sun’s uprising.
III
THE crucial moment, Lewis had always known, would be not that of his farewell to Treeshy, but of his final interview with his father.
On that everything hung: his immediate future as well as his more distant prospects. As he stole home in the early sunlight, over the dew-drenched grass, he glanced up apprehensively at Mr. Raycie’s windows, and thanked his stars that they were still tightly shuttered.
There was no doubt, as Mrs. Raycie said, that her husband’s “using language” before ladies showed him to be in high good humour, relaxed and slippered, as it were—a state his family so seldom saw him in that Lewis had sometimes impertinently wondered to what awful descent from the clouds he and his two sisters owed their timorous being.
It was all very well to tell himself, as he often did, that the bulk of the money was his mother’s, and that he could turn her round his little finger. What difference did that make? Mr. Raycie, the day after his marriage, had quietly taken over the management of his wife’s property, and deducted, from the very moderate allowance he accorded her, all her little personal expenses, even to the postage-stamps she used, and the dollar she put in the plate every Sunday. He called the allowance her “pin-money,” since, as he often reminded her, he paid all the household bills himself, so that Mrs. Raycie’s quarterly pittance could be entirely devoted, if she chose, to frills and feathers.