Alexina went over and seized the other’s hands as children do. A softer feeling had come over her. Perhaps Emily was doing this thing to help her people. Besides, she and Emily used to weave wonderful garbs in bygone days, for the wearing to the Prince’s ball. To be sure, one never had pictured an Uncle Austen as the possible Prince, but still Emily should have them, if she wanted them.
Alexina’s gaze fell upon a flower lying on the floor, which had dropped out of Garrard Ransome’s buttonhole. The boy loved flowers as most men from the blue grass country do, and the cottage yard was a wilderness of them. She had almost forgotten Garrard’s share in this. She picked the flower up and handed it to Emily. “Dr. Ransome has been here,” she said, feeling treacherous—for the other man, after all, was her uncle.
Emily took it, and laid it against the lace of her parasol, this way and that.
“I’ve always, as far back as I can remember, meant to be somebody, something,” said Emily. She said it without emotion, as one states a fact. Then she rose and picked up her glove. “Sometimes I’ve thrown my arms out and felt I could scream, it all has seemed so poor and crowded and hateful to me,” which was large unburdening of self for Emily. Then she went. At the door she laid the flower on a chair.
The three weeks of Molly’s illness brought it to the end of August, and, as she convalesced, Alexina began to plan for Aden. In the midst of her preparations the Major and Harriet returned.
She went out to the house the morning of their arrival. The luggage was being unloaded at the curb as she reached the gate, and, hearing voices as she stepped on the porch, she looked in at the parlour window. Harriet, her hat yet on, was bending her head that little Stevie, urged by his mother, might kiss her. The baby was no shyer about it than the woman, yet the woman smiled as the baby’s lips touched her face.
As she rose she saw Alexina and came to the door to meet her. She kissed the girl almost with embarrassment, yet kept hold of her hands, while suddenly her eyes filled with something she tried to laugh away.
“I had your letter,” she was saying, “and resent it, too, that you are going, and so does Stephen.” Her face changed, her voice grew hesitant, hurried. “He’s never going to be better than now”—was it a sob?—“but since I may have him, may keep him, and he is willing now to live so for me, though not at first, not at first— Oh, Alexina, it has been bitter!”
Alexina followed her into the parlour. The Major was there in a wheeled chair, the babies afar off, refusing to obey the maternal pokes and pushes to go to him, and regarding him and his wheeled affair with furtive, wide-eyed suspicion. The eyes of the Major were full of the humour of it.
“Now had I been a gamboling satyr on hoofs they would have accepted me at once,” he assured Alexina. “It’s this mingling of the familiar with the unnatural—”