"But we shall be together," said little Miss Massey, as though that beloved truth answered everything. The man had thrown his arms about her and had drawn her quite close, and she looked up into his face with eyes that still shone. Oh, how long she had loved him! And how long had it been since she settled to the realization that though he loved her, he was proud and would not speak. This spoken love she had craved with all her heart; and it had been withheld because he had no money and her father had too much.
"Will you tell me your real objection to me?" asked the man with frank directness appealing to the Eagle Man. "For that you have had objections to me I've sensed always."
The Eagle Man turned and looked the younger man over, carefully, critically, before answering. Indeed, he was so long about speaking that the children, at least, thought he never meant to speak again.
But at last: "My daughter," he began, "is now thirty-six. She has had thirty-six years of luxury, of merely raising her finger and receiving highly trained service. She is not a young girl who might, being more adaptable and buoyed up by romance, settle down to a new order of life; she is too used to the luxuries I have been able to give her, servants, carriages, horses, travel, fine clothes—" he enumerated them all with distinctness, giving each item a lengthy second before going on to his conclusion. "It will work real hardship on her to be compelled to give up all these things to do her own work and to make over her own dresses."
"You're mistaken, father," Miss Massey denied, "all that giving up, if giving up you can call it, will be my joy if I can be with Robert." Her voice, deep with emotion, died into a silence which reigned for moments. No one seemed to wish to break it, not even the baby. And yet, though the meaning of all the spoken words had not been clear to Suzanna, her eager, sensitive little mind seized on pictures which seemed somehow to fit in; yet pictures in their simplicity so far removed from her surroundings of luxury that they would seem but vagrant fancies.
Had she attempted to translate them, she would have failed, yet as they grew momentarily more vivid and meaningful, interpretive words, as vivid as the pictures themselves, rushed to her lips. She turned to the Eagle Man.
"Oh, on Saturday night when supper is over and the shades are pulled down and the lamp is lit in the parlor, and Robert is reading a big book with pictures in it, and the children, except the two eldest, are all asleep upstairs and it's raining outside, and you can hear the pitapat, pitapat of the drops on the window pane, then Miss Massey will be happy. Before supper Miss Massey'll have felt awful tired and she'll hurry up things and she'll make her eldest little girl hurry too, but after the dishes are cleared away, and she's sitting close to Robert, she'll be so glad she's in out of the rain with her children all in safe too, that she'll not care a bit about raising her finger for a little man to come and ask her what she wants. She'll not want to go about in a carriage, or travel in a big train!"
No one spoke. Only the scene painted so simply grew in the hearts of at least two there, so that Robert drew his promised wife a little closer to him and she glanced up in his face with eyes full of color.
Suzanna went on. She had forgotten her audience. She was just telling out the pictures that had been built into her life; supper tables with many young faces about; little babies who had stayed just awhile; hasty words and loving making up; the star-dust of the real every-day life.
"You know," she continued, "that Maizie and I crept downstairs one Saturday night because I wanted to tell daddy something, and mother was sitting right close to him, and we heard her say: 'When the children are safe in bed, and just you and I are here—then I see things clearer—' And he just looked at her and said, 'Sweetheart!' and his voice was nicer than even when he says good-night to Maizie and me."