“Kiss me, Roland, and make up. I declare it makes me feel as down-spirited as Mr. Dolloway in a rheumatic attack to come home all full of my scheme and have you throw cold water on me this way. Really, dear, you must tell me. You know I always tease till I find out.”
Roland looked at her angrily; but there was something so genuinely loving and sympathetic in the piquant face before him that he felt moved to unburden his mind of the load it had carried. Not a very big load, some lads might think, but, to a nature as earnest and chivalrous as Roland Beckwith’s, quite bitter enough. “Well, then, I have behaved outrageously to my mother.”
“Roland—Beckwith! You!”
In two minutes the little story had been told.
“What did Motherkin say?”
“Not one word. If she’d only scold!”
“No; that’s one disobliging thing about our mother. I ‘sym,’ dear; I’ve been there myself. I’ve often felt as if a good, downright nagging wouldn’t hurt one-thousandth part as much as one of those astonished glances of hers. They cut like a knife just home from the sharpener’s. Well, so you didn’t have any luncheon?”
“I didn’t want any; I couldn’t have eaten it, after that.”
“That accounts for the headache; so both head and heart pains are settled for. Now, the cure. Come along with me.”
“No, I’d rather not. If Mother happened out here, I’d talk it over with her. I’m a confounded idiot, Bon. I felt so big and manly, somehow, thinking I had the whole ‘farm’ under my own control; and then I was mad at that young one everlastingly getting into trouble for somebody else to be plagued with; and I’d made up my mind to accomplish just so much of the ploughing, no matter what happened. And it is awful hard work. I wouldn’t acknowledge it before; but it seems sometimes as if I couldn’t drag one foot after the other. And look at my hands!”