"She says she didn't understand. It is all over town that she didn't know Letty's condition was serious."
"Then why do you ask me? If she didn't understand, I must have blundered in the telling. That's the only possible answer to your question."
He rose as he spoke, and lifting Letty from the footstool, placed her gently between the deep arms of the chair.
"Isn't there anything that you can say, David?"
"No, that seems to be the trouble. There isn't anything that I can say." Already he was on his way to the door, and as he glanced back, Caroline noticed that, in spite of his tenderness with the child, his face looked sad and stern. "There's a man waiting for me downstairs," he added, "but I'll see you both later. Wake Letty before long or she won't sleep to-night."
Then he went out quickly, while Mrs. Timberlake turned to take up her knitting.
"If I didn't know that David Blackburn had plenty of sense about some things," she remarked grimly while she drew the needle from the roll, "I'd be tempted to believe that he was a perfect fool."
CHAPTER XIII
Indirect Influence
IN January a heavy snow fell, and Letty, who had begun to cough again, was kept indoors for a week. After the morning lessons were over, Mammy Riah amused the child, while Caroline put on her hat and coat, and went for a brisk walk down the lane to the road. Once or twice Mary joined her, but since Alan's return Caroline saw the girl less and less, and no one else in the house appeared to have the spirit for exercise. Blackburn she met only at breakfast and luncheon, and since Christmas he seemed to have become completely engrossed in his plans. After the talk she had heard on the terrace, his figure slowly emerged out of the mist of perplexity in her mind. He was no longer the obscure protagonist of a vague political unrest, for the old dishonourable bond which had linked him, in her imagination, to the Southern Republicans of her father's day, was broken forever. She was intelligent enough to grasp the difference between the forces of reaction and development; and she understood now that Blackburn had worked out a definite theory—that his thinking had crystallized into a constructive social philosophy. "He knows the South, he understands it," she thought. "He sees it, not made, but becoming. That is the whole difference between him and father. Father was as patriotic as Mr. Blackburn, but father's patriotism clung to the past—it was grateful and commemorative—and Mr. Blackburn's strives toward the future, for it is active and creative. Father believed that the South was separate from the Union, like one of the sacred old graveyards, with bricked-up walls, in the midst of cornfields, while the younger man, also believing it to be sacred, is convinced that it must be absorbed into the nation—that its traditions and ideals must go to enrich the common soil of America." Already she was beginning insensibly to associate Blackburn with the great group of early Virginians, with the men in whom love of country was a vital and living thing, the men who laid the foundation and planned the structure of the American Republic.
"Do you think Mr. Blackburn feels as strongly as he talks?" she asked Mrs. Timberlake one afternoon when they were standing together by the nursery window. It had been snowing hard, and Caroline, in an old coat with a fur cap on her head, was about to start for a walk.