“Don’t expect me to answer that. Go on and tell me what’s ‘meat’ in so much ‘cocoanut.’”
“She believes—and she takes pages to justify her belief—that she has traced the parentage of one Dorothy, a foundling! Indeed! Why, Seth, those people up in that unhappy Nova Scotia—unhappy to be afflicted with two such foolish visitors—they think themselves detectives fit to rank with the world’s greatest. I thought Schuyler had some sense if Lucretia hadn’t. If they weren’t already there I’d bid them both ‘go to Halifax’ as I used to be bidden when I was a naughty little girl and plagued my nurse. She makes a great ado about Dorothy’s ‘unhappiness.’ I can’t believe that. I never, never saw a happier child in all my life. The idea! Lucretia is just as simple as she was always. She’s set out to find who Dorothy’s parents are or were and she thinks she’s found. The idea! The impertinent minx!”
The “Learned Blacksmith” did not reply, but calmly perused his own paper. He was a blacksmith transformed, and he seemed to fit into this environment as readily and completely as he had fitted the simple life of the old smithy under the Great Balm tree. He had recovered his health but was sojourning for a little time in this old resort of his youth, meeting those who were lads and maidens then but now as venerable as himself. Few among them were as alert, as vigorous and as young of heart as Cousin Betty and himself; and they two had, as a younger guest remarked: “Been having the time of their lives. Why, that black-eyed old lady has more attention this day than any of us girls; and as for wit and repartée, there isn’t her equal this year at our Springs.”
After a few moments of this silence, during which Mrs. Calvert tapped her white slipper impatiently, she interrupted her companion’s reading by an exclamation:
“Seth Winters, do put up that tiresome paper and listen. I don’t believe you’ve comprehended a single sentence you’ve looked at. I know. Your eyes had that hungry-for-Dorothy look in them. Leastwise, if they hadn’t, the feel of it is in my own old heart. A pretty how’d-ye-do, when that little Lu Breckenridge-Hungerford sets out to hint to me of my duty! a slip of a girl like her—the saucy chit!”
Old Seth laughed, so merrily that others drew near to learn the sport; seeing which, Mistress Elizabeth Cecil Somerset-Calvert, rather haughtily arose and remarked:
“Come, Cousin Seth, I’d like to take a walk.”
Pacing the green grove, up and down its smooth paths, they were undisturbed; but now all desire for conversation had left Mrs. Betty. She was, indeed, in deep reflection; wondering if a certain course she had followed were all for the best as she had hitherto esteemed it; and the only hint she gave to the blacksmith was the sentence:
“I wanted to wait till she came of her own accord. I’ve never quite forgiven her for preferring that woman Martha to me.”
Then she went on in a silence which he knew her too well to disturb and finally she announced: