Eliza was gone a good while. But she triumphantly returned with the lemon. Mr. O'Donnell looked at Miss Whitcom's tea a little wistfully. He had already taken cream. Possibly he preferred lemon too. But it requires real genius to ask for what one doesn't see before one in this law-of-least-resistance world.
This slight tension removed, the Rev. Needham resumed a quiet conversation with Barry about the affairs in the West. Everything, it seemed, was going finely. It began to look as though they might all grow positively rich off the desert! And it was owing to Barry—entirely to him. Well, Barry was a fine young man—so completely satisfactory. If the Needhams had had a son, Alfred would have wished him to be like Barry. Sure, patient, untiring, generous—generous to a fault, yet with such solid faculties for business! And now, here he was, about to step right into the family. It was too good to be true. Yes, much too good. The Rev. Needham swelled with pride and beamed with affection. He beamed on Barry, and never noted how his daughter sat there beside this paragon, eating little, talking almost not at all....
Hilda was another member of the party who talked little. Her deportment, however, was quite different. Her cheeks were highly coloured, and her eyes sparkled. Aunt Marjie, who seemed somehow never too engrossed in anything to give good heed to everything else, looked curiously from Hilda to Louise, to Barry, from Barry on to her brother-in-law. Then she looked at Hilda again, recalling Leslie, and smiled. She looked at Louise again, also, then at Barry, and her expression grew more serious. She looked at Louise a third time, still with Leslie in the back of her mind, and thought of the forgotten stove burners....
Why was it, she asked herself, that men had to make such baffling differences in women's lives?
6
After luncheon the company broke up. The Rev. Needham announced, just a little stiffly (for he felt the upsetting gaze of his sister-in-law) that it was customary at Beachcrest to spend a quiet hour, at this point of the day's span, napping. He wanted to create an easy home atmosphere, and the most effective way seemed to be to impress outsiders with the fact that everything was really running along just as though none but the immediate family was present.
Miss Whitcom yawned at once. "Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "I'm horribly sleepy. Never would have dreamed what was the matter with me, Alfred, if you hadn't come to the rescue. I am grateful!"
And then—and then the Rev. Needham did a tremendous, a revolutionary, a gigantic and unforgettable thing. He simply overwhelmed himself and everybody else by making an almost low bow!
Mrs. Needham uttered a tiny gasp—she really couldn't help it. What had gotten into Alfred? Then she laughed, a little too shrilly, as by way of heralding to all the Point the glorious, glad tidings that there was, at last, a genuine, wholesome, jolly home atmosphere established.