“You’ll read it to me after we’ve done our German, won’t you?” whispered the girl, caressingly, as she leaned a moment on the back of Mar’s chair.
“Read it to you? Why should I?” he said, nervously, as he laid a piece of blotting-paper over his letter.
“You always do,” she pleaded. But if Mr. Mar imagined that his daughter was begging to hear the letter he himself had just written, Mrs. Mar made no such mistake. She was well aware whose communications had power to stir the “stolid” Hildegarde.
“You never told me,” the lady arraigned her husband’s back, “that you’d been hearing again from young Galbraith.”
Hildegarde, under the electric shock of the spoken name, seemed to feel called upon to make some show of indifference. She inspected the pile of mending with an air of complete absorption in the extent of the damage. Her mother was saying: “I haven’t heard anything about that gentleman”—(oh, wealth of ironic condemnation the accomplished speaker could throw into the innocent words “that gentleman!”)—“not since the letter he wrote from the barbarous place you didn’t know how to pronounce, and couldn’t so much as find on the map!”
“Haven’t you?” said her husband. “Well, you soon may.”
The girl’s lowered eyelids fluttered, but the prospect of soon hearing something on this theme left Mrs. Mar collected enough to say: “No earthly use to darn that.”
“N-no,” agreed the girl.
“Lay a piece under. Match the stripe and cut out the fray. There’s some like it in the ottoman.”
Hildegarde went and kneeled down before the big deal “store-box.” Its lid, stuffed and neatly covered, made a sightly receptacle for endless oddments.