“I don’t feel anything—and I don’t see anything,” answered Katharine.
But she knew what her mother meant, and it made her a little sad—even her. She had been accustomed all her life to believe that her mother was the most beautiful woman in the world, and she knew that the time had just come when she must grow used to not believing it any longer. Mrs. Lauderdale had never said anything of the sort before. She had been supreme in her way, and had taken it for granted that she was, never referring to her own looks under any circumstances.
In the long silence that followed, Katharine quietly went and closed the shutters of the windows, for Ralston had only pulled down the shades. She drew the dark curtains across for the evening, lit another gaslight, and remained standing by the fireplace.
“Thank you, darling,” said Mrs. Lauderdale.
“I do wish papa would let us have lamps, or shades, or something,” said Katharine, looking disconsolately at the ground-glass globes of the gaslights.
“He doesn’t like them—he says he can’t see.”
There was a short pause.
“Oh, mother dear! what in the world does papa like, I wonder?” Katharine turned with an impatient movement as she spoke, and her broad eyebrows almost met between her eyes.
“Hush, child!” But the words were uttered wearily and mechanically—Mrs. Lauderdale had pronounced them so often under precisely the same circumstances during the last quarter of a century.
Katharine sighed, a little out of impatience and to some extent in pity for her mother. But she stood looking across the room at the closed door through which Ralston and she had gone out together five minutes earlier, and she could still feel his last kiss on her cheek. He had never seemed so loving as on that day, and she had succeeded in persuading him, against his instinctive judgment, to promise her what she asked,—the maddest, most foolish thing a girl’s imagination could long for, no matter with what half-reasonable excuse. But she had his promise, which, as she well knew, he would keep—and she loved him with all her heart. The expression of mingled sadness and impatience vanished like a breath from a polished mirror. She was unconscious that she looked radiantly happy, as her mother gazed up into her face.