“All right,” said Mahala, “I will. As you recall, when you stepped to the door my back was turned. You had a better chance to see any one who might have been in the shrubbery than I had. You have not the faintest notion who made the attack on Junior. Do you think it would be fair for me to answer your demand for the truth with merely a surmise on my part? I didn’t see who threw that piece of brick, so I positively refuse to make any surmise!”
Mahala turned again to the mirror and loosened one end of the silver wreath with something very closely resembling a jerk; while Mahlon, studying her back and her shoulders and the set of her yellow head, and catching a flash of the blazing eyes that the mirror reflected, suddenly remembered the advice that had been given him by his wife concerning the petticoat: “Don’t begin anything with Mahala that you can’t finish.”
He realized that he had undertaken something that he was not man enough to finish. Maybe there was a man in the world who could have laid rough hands upon Mahala and choked and beaten from her the information he wanted. Because of Mahlon’s inherent refinement he was not the man who, by any possibility, could do this. As gracefully as he ever passed down the church aisle on Sabbath morning with the contribution box, Mahlon arose, and walking over to the mirror, he put his arm around the small emanation of his own self-esteem.
“Very well, Mahala,” he said, “as always, Papa accepts your word. If you didn’t see who made this unjustifiable attack on Junior, of course, you cannot tell me who did it. I shall make it my business to find out for myself in some other way.”
“Thank you, Papa, that will be fine,” said Mahala, freeing the other end of the wreath. She opened her lips and looked at her father and then she closed them. What she had wanted to say was: “If there is a boy in this world who has the courage to throw a brick when Junior Moreland tries to kiss me, I am very much obliged to him!” But what she desired above everything else at that minute was to stop the discussion, to be left alone. Faintly in the distance, she now visioned a period, and so she stood carefully straightening the wreath, wordless and waiting.
Realizing something of this, Mahlon took her in his arms and kissed her tenderly. He told her that he hoped she always would be a good girl, and if, at any time, anything worried her or she was in any way annoyed, she must come straight to Papa, who only wanted what was for her good and that she should grow up into such an exemplary and beautiful woman as her mother was.
The period came at last, so beautifully rounded and of such touching sentiment that Mahala emphasized it by putting her arms around her father’s neck, kissing him and thanking him, and giving him a slight propulsion in the direction of the door, through which he got himself without further speech. At last Mahala was left alone to the night and the bird.
Her first thought was to wonder if there could be anything really serious resulting from the blow which Junior had so richly deserved. She decided that on account of Junior’s youth and strength, he would speedily be all right. That burden eased from her mind, she went back to the window, and with her arms around the cage again, leaned her face against the wires and looked into the night of wonder and tried to think deep and straight.
This was difficult for it was a night of enchantment to the girl. The clouds floated across the moon and obscured it, then drifted away and left the night silvered in the high lights, deeply black in the shadows. Her heart ached over the lean face she had glimpsed through the window. Why should the best boy and the best scholar in her class be an outcast through no fault of his? Hers had been a lovely party from her mother’s viewpoint—weeks of preparation, pretty clothes, gifts, and adulation. Of course, the brick incident, annoying, but nothing of any moment—a beautiful party——
Mahala choked back an aching sob. She softly slipped her hand into the cage, picked the canary from his perch, and kissed his bright head before she went to bed in the early gray of morning. And even then, she was too restless, filled with pity, to sleep. She told herself repeatedly that she should have been anxious about Junior; but all the trouble in her heart arose from fear as to what might be happening to Jason.