But as the minutes went by and she ran from one familiar thing to another in garden and house, with greeting and gay comment, spinning out the time till she and Hildegarde should be alone together, the older girl began to have her doubts. Was Bella as happy as she pretended, flitting about with all her “dear Mars?”
Nothing possible to gather from her eagerness to be assured that so far from being forgotten, she was more than ever an object of interest and devotion. Nothing new Bella’s little weakness for wanting everybody to be visibly enlivened by her return from “abroad,” bringing her adorable frocks (for Bella’s American mama had come into money, and Bella was helping her to come out of a certain portion), bringing remembrances for everybody, bringing a whiff of foreign airs, and a touch of something exciting, exotic, into the lives of stay-at-home folk. Bella had always been one of those who, however much adored, would like to be adored yet a little more. She couldn’t bear that any one within reach of her influence should escape caring about her, and she cast a net uncommon wide. It was meant to enmesh even Hildegarde’s mother, partly because that lady was so little lavish in bestowing her affection, but mostly because if you were much in the Mar house it mattered enormously upon what terms you were with Mrs. Mar. But, as ill-luck would have it, Bella never thought of the lady once she was away from her. Though she had brought back scarf-pins for the boys, and a silver-mounted blackthorn for Mr. Mar, and a quite wonderful necklace for Hildegarde, there was nothing—nothing at all for Mrs. Mar—and it was serious.
Bella never realized the awful omission till, having dispensed the other gifts, she stood with the rest of the family in the garden, not even asking where Mrs. Mar was, till looking up, she saw that lady at her bedroom window carefully trying on a new pair of gloves. “Everything depends on the way they’re put on the first time.” Bella could hear her saying it, and she looked up smiling and waving her hand, as much as to say, “Oh, please hurry down! You’re the person I’m pining most of all to see again.” But, of herself, Miss Bella was silently asking, “What am I to do! What will happen if she should see she’s the only one I’ve forgotten?” Bella’s brain worked feverishly. Glancing down, her eye fell on a gold pencil she was wearing on a chain. Surreptitiously detaching this latest gift of her mother’s, Bella slipped it in her pocket, talking all the time; telling Mr. Mar what it felt like to see sunshine, real Californian sunshine again; offering up to public scorn the English girl who had disapproved of the unappreciative Californians for rooting arum lilies out of their gardens, and throwing them away in sheaves, which Bella admitted was what they did with the “pest.” “Just like your American extravagance,” the English girl had said.
Oh, it was so perfectly heavenly to be at home again! Bella beamed in her old conscienceless way at poor Trenn, who found a heady tonic—a hope new born, in hearing the adored one call the Mar house “home.”
But even while he was savoring the sweetness of that thought, there was the distracting creature linking her arm in Harry’s, and saying: “Come away a moment and tell me something I want to know.”
What could a boy like Harry possibly tell Bella that she could want to know!
Harry’s own huge satisfaction in the incident was cruelly damped upon Bella’s saying: “Does your mother still love stumps?”
“Stumps! Love s-stumps!” he muttered, in amazement.
“Yes. You haven’t forgotten how she always kept her pencils till they were so little nobody else could have held on to them.”
“Oh, that kind. Yes. Stumps! I see.”