With a sigh she looked down at her slippered feet. "I was thinking to-day what a comfort Dick is to me—to us all," she said, "one is so sure of him and he is doing so splendidly at college."
"Yes," he agreed, "Dick is a comfort. I wish poor Alice was more like him."
"She was always wild, you remember, never like other children, and it was impossible to make her understand that some things were right and some wrong. Yet I never thought that she would care for such a loud, vulgar creature as Geoffrey Heath."
"Did she care for him?" asked Daniel, almost in a whisper, "or was it only that she wanted to see Paris?"
"Well, she may have improved him a little—at least let us hope so," she remarked as if she had not heard his question. "He has money, at any rate, and that is what she has always wanted, though I fear even Geoffrey's income will be strained by her ceaseless extravagance."
As she finished he thought of her own youth, which she had evidently forgotten, and it seemed to him that the faults she blamed most in Alice were those which she had overcome patiently in her own nature.
"I could stand anything better than this long suspense," he said gently.
"It does wear one out," she rejoined. "I am very, very sorry for you."
Some unaccustomed tone in her voice—a more human quality, a deeper cadence, made him wonder in an impulse of self-reproach if, after all, the breach between them was in part of his own making? Was it still possible to save from the ruin, if not love, at least human companionship?
"Lydia," he said, "it isn't Alice, it is mostly loneliness, I think."