“Yes, yes, pet, you are. Only—how shall one tell the child?—not quite, dearie, so pleasant as if you cared—” Mrs. Budd stopped short, a little flustered with her own indelicacy, finishing the sentence with eyes and hands. In all her talks with Julia she had not before come quite so near to putting it plainly. Of the two, Julia, looking gravely into her mother’s face, was the least embarrassed.
“But I don’t,” she said simply.
“But try, pettie; try to!” Mrs. Budd’s voice was anxious, pleading. “Mother wishes it so much.”
Julia bowed her head over the nearest dachshund, turned his collar with deliberate fingers. She was frankly gaining time, casting about for some likely means to put off her own realization of the subject that made the air fairly electric between them.
This she seemed to find in the young man who stepped out of the glass room upon the lawn, a little dazed in the noon glare. Her appeal was a sweet, ringing cry.
“Oh, Mr. Longacre!”
Seeing them together, he stood a minute, seemed to hesitate, then came toward them over the grass; hatless in the sunshine, he looked fair, and a little dreamy. His finger kept the place in his book.
Mrs. Budd surveyed him with a solicitude amounting to annoyance. She turned on her daughter, her mouth shaped for speech, but his quick approach gave her no time. It was Julia who took up the snapped thread of talk in a fluttering sentence:
“It’s my dogs—Mr. Longacre—I—I wanted you to see them.” She was flushed, forehead to chin.
“Oh!” He seemed to just arrive at what was expected of him. “They’re very nice ones.”