It was long past midnight when he went to bed and almost morning when he fell asleep. He was certain that he was the only person awake in Waltonville and he felt as though he were guarding his beloved.
Mrs. Bent said nothing to her daughter about the sudden and frequent visits of this young man. Certainly no two persons could be more safely or profitably employed than in playing or reading together! She did not listen to what they read, but sat wrapped in her own thoughts, or in that blankness of mind which serves even the most mentally active for thought at times. There were now many moments when she looked worried and harassed. A course which had once seemed reasonable was beginning to seem more and more mad.
On Wednesday evening Richard returned, having kept himself away since Tuesday afternoon. He had said nothing to his mother about Eleanor or her books or her piano. He had been making vague plans. Certain expressions of his mother's came back to him; a sigh when he sat down at the piano, and an unflattering opinion of Thomasina's finger exercises, heard by Mrs. Lister as she passed the house. Thomasina, she had said, had been "tinkling and banging," two favorite words from her small musical vocabulary. Richard felt that the time was not propitious. He would wait a day or two until the confusion in his mind had given place to those even and regular processes which had always been his.
He found Eleanor seated on the upper step of the porch, trying to read by the failing light, and he sat down and leaned against the other pillar from where he could watch her. She told him what she had been doing, how she had practiced—this a little wistfully—all the morning, and how she had found that Dr. Green had sat in his carriage listening to her for dear knows how long.
"He's a funny soul," said Eleanor. "He's always bossing me and correcting me, but I love him. Aren't you very fond of him?"
"I don't know that I am," said Richard, conscious of a sudden cooling of whatever emotion he had felt toward Dr. Green.
"Well, I am," said Eleanor. "Did you ever hear how he disposes of his books?"
"No."
"If he begins a book and doesn't like its theories, he drops it into his waste-basket. Then his Virginia carefully fishes it out and carries it down to the cabins. She has a lot of shelves made of soap-boxes, and there stand Billings on the Eye and Jackson on Bones and Piatt on dear knows what."