CHAPTER XVII
SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION
As the weeks passed, Eveley noticed a change in the conduct of the honeymoon home beneath her. Many times in the early morning, she saw Mrs. Severs going out with a covered basket and wearing an old long coat and a tight-fitting small hat. And sometimes she met her in the evening, coming home, dusty, tired and happy.
“I am going to father’s,” she would explain lightly. Or, “I have been out with father to-day.”
And at the quizzical laughter in Eveley’s eyes, she would add defiantly: “He is a darling, Eveley, and I was very silly. Why didn’t you bring me to my senses?”
For Mrs. Severs was feeling less well than usual, and in the long absence of her husband every day, she was learning to depend on the brusk, kindly, capable father-in-law. And many days, when she was not well enough to leave home, he came himself, and the girls up-stairs could hear him in the kitchen below, preparing dinner for Andy and his ailing bride.
“Whatever should I do without him, Miss Ainsworth?” she sometimes asked. “He does everything for me. And I think he likes me pretty well, now he is getting used to me. He is good to me,—his little funny ways are not really funny any more, but rather sweet. I spoiled everything with my selfishness, and he will never try to live with us again.”
One evening, when Father-in-law had been particularly tender and helpful, she looked at Eveley with brooding eyes, and said, “You are such a nice girl, but I sort of blame you because father is not with us. You are so much cleverer than I,—couldn’t you have opened my eyes before it was too late?”
And Eveley ran up the stairs shaking her slender fists in the air. “Deliver me from brides,” she said devoutly to the rose in the corner of her roof garden. “Grooms are bad enough, but brides are utterly impossible. I would not live with one for anything on earth. To think of the wretched life they were living until I helped them to a proper adjustment,—and now she holds me responsible. I always said Father-in-law was the most desirable member of the family.”
But even he disappointed her.