“Emily—” Alexina sprang from the stool and stood with apprehension rushing to her face in rising colour and dilated gaze. “Oh—Emily!”
Was it foreboding in her eyes as they swept Emily’s girlish loveliness?
“He didn’t seem to mind my being poor,” said Emily; “he said it was my practical and praiseworthy way of going to work that made him first—oh, Alexina,” she coloured and looked at the other, “he didn’t even mind our little house—and mother doing the work.”
A sort of rage against Emily seized Alexina. She stamped her foot.
“Oh,” she cried, “why shouldn’t he the rather go down on his unbending knees in gratitude that you’ll even listen? You’re twenty-one and he’s fifty-one. You have everything, you’re lovely, you’ve your voice, you haven’t begun to live yet—oh, I know he’s my uncle, and I remember all he’s done for me, but I’ve known him years, Emily, years, and I’ve never seen Uncle Austen laugh once.”
What on earth has laughing to do with it? Alexina always was queer. This from Emily. Not that she said it, except in the puzzled, uncomprehending stare at Alexina, while she returned to what she had come to communicate. “We’re going to be married the first day of October,” she said. “Mr. Blair has to go East on some business then.”
Alexina drew herself together with a laugh. What was the use—yet she could not divest herself of a responsibility.
She looked at Emily, who was looking at her. Their eyes met. Alexina looked away.
“Emily,” she said, “there’s a thing”—it took effort to say it—“a thing maybe you haven’t thought of. It came to Aunt Harriet; it comes to everybody, I feel sure. Won’t you be cutting yourself off from any right to it?” The red was waving up to Alexina’s very hair.
Emily showed no resentment at this implication which both seemed to take for granted, but then she was not following Alexina very closely, her own thoughts being absorbing. “The wedding will have to be in our little house,” she said, “so it won’t make much difference about the dress; nobody’ll be there. But for the rest, I’m going to have some clothes. I told mother and father and grandfather so this morning.”