“You mean he has disappeared in order not to fight for the South?” Dorothea asked earnestly. She remembered the face she had seen at the window the night before and now realized the reason for the agony it expressed. He was alone, this poor Lee Hendon, with whom she had instinctively sympathized when first she had heard of him. He had stopped to see his sweetheart for the last time and then— But here her thoughts came to a sudden stop. April had been on the porch, too, last night. Of a sudden Dorothea thought she saw a clear explanation of all that had seemed mysterious to her. April was not a “Red String” after all. The lovers had met and parted.
“April must be told,” she heard Mrs. Stewart saying, “and I don’t know how the news is to be broken to her.”
It was on the tip of Dorothea’s tongue to say that Mrs. Stewart need not worry about April’s knowing it; but instead she suggested speaking to Mrs. May as soon as she returned to the house.
“I think we had better go back as soon as possible,” she ended. “Aunt Parthenia will know exactly what to do.”
“You have an old head on young shoulders,” Mrs. Stewart said approvingly. “Call me ‘Aunt Cora,’ dear—though I shan’t be here long. I knew I should love you the moment I saw you.” On the instant she seemed to have forgotten April’s affairs and was back again on her own perplexities. “Do you think I might manage two running bags?” she went on, looking up with a wrinkled forehead as if the decision was a most momentous one. “Perhaps two would be too heavy. Still my hoops are good and wide and I’ve just had them repaired.”
Dorothea gravely advised her about the bags.
“If I go to Brazil,” Mrs. Stewart continued fretfully, “perhaps I’d better leave my diamonds and take my other jewelry instead. Diamonds are very common in Brazil, they tell me. Every one has them. They grow them there, I think; but I’m not sure of that. And then there’s the matter of the climate. No one seems to know what it’s really like. I wonder if Lee Hendon could possibly have gone there?”
Dorothea held up a warning finger. She heard the voices of the girls returning, and Mrs. Stewart, understanding, changed the subject at once without in the least changing the note of her complaining voice.
“Of course, war is war,” she rambled on; “but what I always said from the first was that no one had any right to begin it unless they were sure they could win, and at the least they should have shown enough foresight to investigate the best places for us to go if we lost. A wise government would have let us all know whether Brazil or Mexico was the right place. But no! Nothing of that sort has been done, and the matter is left to the ladies to settle. However, whichever way I decide, your father, Corinne, will think we had better go to the other place.”
“I don’t believe Uncle Charlie will want to go away at all,” Harriot remarked placidly, munching a piece of cake. “I don’t see why he shouldn’t stay right here the same as before.”