“Don’t you think mother is perfectly wonderful, Oliver?”
He nodded. He felt that he could not trust his voice. He knew now that he was in love—that he always had been in love with Jane, that he always would be in love with her. He compressed his lips and fought against the strange, mad impulse to shout that he was in love with her, that she was his—all his—and that no man should take her away from him.
And she? She was thinking of that dry, hot night when he came to see her after leaving his father, out of breath, his shoes covered with fresh black mud. There had been no rain for weeks. The roads were thick with dust. And Lansing too had noticed that his shoes were muddy. He had spoken to her about them, he had wondered where Oliver had been to get into mud up to his shoe tops! And she, herself, had never ceased to wonder.
Mr. Sage was speaking to Mrs. Sammy. “Yes, my dear Muriel, I can’t quite believe I am awake. It all seems like a dream.”
His wife not only overheard this remark but obviously the one that led up to it.
“Oh, I say, old dear,” she exclaimed, “you must get over the notion that you are asleep. It’s not complimentary to me to have you going about everywhere pinching yourself to see whether you’re awake or not. And the worst of it is, he pinches me every now and then to see whether I am flesh and blood or merely a hallucination.”
Sammy cleared his throat gallantly. “Permit me to say, Miss Judge, that you are a dream, and if I was Mr. Sage I’d never wake up.”
She lifted her lorgnon and regarded him with languid interest. “After that, my dear Sammy, I am sure your wife will like me much better if you call me Aunt Josephine. Even though I am old enough to be your mother, I—Why, when I look at Jane I doubt my own eyes. That I, Josephine Judge, should have a daughter as big as Jane is more than I can grasp. I am filled with wonder. I—”
“It’s more of a wonder, Josephine Sage,” broke in Mrs. Grimes tartly, “that you haven’t got any grandchildren.”
“My dear Mrs. Grimes, don’t blame me for that,” said Josephine.