The last time I was at Mrs. Greyfield's, I found there only herself and her daughter Nellie.
"I have adopted her," she said, "with her father's consent. She is a charming girl, and I could not bear to leave her motherless. Benton is very much attached to his father. They are off on a mountaineering expedition at present, but I hope they will come home before you go away."
"Are you not going to tell me," I asked, "how you finally settled matters between Mr. Greyfield and yourself."
"He is a very persistent suitor," she replied, smiling, "I can hardly tell what to do with him."
"You do not want to break bark over his head?" I said, laughing.
"No; but I do almost wish that since he had stayed away so long he had never come back. I had got used to my own quiet, old-maid ways. I was done, or thought I was done, with passion and romance; and now to be tossed about in this way, on the billows of doubt—to love and not to love—to feel revengeful and forgiving—to think one way in the morning and another way by noon, is very tiresome. I really do not know what to do with him."
I smiled, because I thought the admission was as good as Mr. Greyfield need desire, for his prospects.
"I think I can understand," I said, "how difficult it must be to get over all the gaps made by so many years of estrangement—of fancied death, even. Had you been looking for him for such a length of time, there would still be a great deal of awkwardness in the meeting, when you came together again."
"Yes," said Mrs. Greyfield, "it is inevitable. The most artistic bit of truth in the Odyssey (you see I have read Homer since you called me Penelope), is where the poet describes the difficulty the faithful wife had in receiving the long-absent, and now changed, Ulysses as her true husband."
"But she did receive him," I interrupted, "and so will you."