“Billy!” cried the man, still more reproachfully.
“But, Bertram, I can't forget—quite yet,” faltered Billy.
Bertram frowned. For a minute he looked as if he were about to take up the matter seriously and argue it with her; but the next moment he smiled and tossed his head with jaunty playfulness—Bertram, to tell the truth, had now had quite enough of what he privately termed “scenes” and “heroics”; and, manlike, he was very ardently longing for the old easy-going friendliness, with all unpleasantness banished to oblivion.
“Oh, but you'll have to forget,” he claimed, with cheery insistence, “for you've promised to forgive me—and one can't forgive without forgetting. So, there!” he finished, with a smilingly determined “now-everything-is-just-as-it-was-before” air.
Billy made no response. She turned hurriedly and began to busy herself with the dishes at the sink. In her heart she was wondering: could she ever forget what Bertram had said? Would anything ever blot out those awful words: “If you would tend to your husband and your home a little more, and go gallivanting off with Calderwell and Arkwright and Alice Greggory a little less—“? It seemed now that always, for evermore, they would ring in her ears; always, for evermore, they would burn deeper and deeper into her soul. And not once, in all Bertram's apologies, had he referred to them—those words he had uttered. He had not said he did not mean them. He had not said he was sorry he spoke them. He had ignored them; and he expected that now she, too, would ignore them. As if she could!” If you would tend to your husband and your home a little more, and go gallivanting off with Calderwell and Arkwright and Alice Greggory a little less—” Oh, if only she could, indeed,—forget!
When Billy went up-stairs that night she ran across her “Talk to Young Wives” in her desk. With a half-stifled cry she thrust it far back out of sight.
“I hate you, I hate you—with all your old talk about 'brushing up against outside interests'!” she whispered fiercely. “Well, I've 'brushed'—and now see what I've got for it!”
Later, however, after Bertram was asleep, Billy crept out of bed and got the book. Under the carefully shaded lamp in the adjoining room she turned the pages softly till she came to the sentence: “Perhaps it would be hard to find a more utterly unreasonable, irritable, irresponsible creature than a hungry man.” With a long sigh she began to read; and not until some minutes later did she close the book, turn off the light, and steal back to bed.
During the next three days, until after the funeral at the shabby little South Boston house, Eliza spent only about half of each day at the Strata. This, much to her distress, left many of the household tasks for her young mistress to perform. Billy, however, attacked each new duty with a feverish eagerness that seemed to make the performance of it very like some glad penance done for past misdeeds. And when—on the day after they had laid the old servant in his last resting place—a despairing message came from Eliza to the effect that now her mother was very ill, and would need her care, Billy promptly told Eliza to stay as long as was necessary; that they could get along all right without her.
“But, Billy, what are we going to do?” Bertram demanded, when he heard the news. “We must have somebody!”