Mermaid had been eyeing the two as if a surprising notion had just occurred to her. Now she slipped on a jacket and started to leave the house, “I have to see Dickie,” she explained to Miss Smiley, “and get him mad enough so he’ll study to-night and pass his chemistry examination to-morrow.” She slipped out.
Left alone, the man and the woman said nothing for a while. Miss Smiley found various supper preparations to occupy her. Ho Ha watched her with the air of a person who wanted to say something but found it difficult to choose the right words. At length, “Keturah,” he got out, “do you remember a time when money made trouble between us?”
Miss Smiley did not answer him. She did not look at him.
“Of course you do,” Ho Ha resumed, undisturbed, apparently, by the silence. “Now what I would like to know is whether the thing that made us trouble can’t be made to mend it?”
Still she did not answer nor appear to heed him.
“I know very well,” said Ho Ha, as if to the furniture, and nodding at the grandfather’s clock which stood at one end of the large living room, “I know well that my fourth cousin or fifth cousin or whoever it was that left me this money left it to me because it belonged to me. I suspect Cousin What’s-the-Name got the money because it belonged to me, and got it from the person who owed it to me expressly to put in my hands. I’m obliged to Cousin Who’s-This as much for trying to do the right thing as for getting me the money. And I feel, somehow, that Cousin You-Can-Guess-Whom thought less about the money than about something else. A cousinly sort of a cousin, but real cousins don’t act that way. Real cousins let each other fend for themselves. But, anyway, that’s no matter, one way or t’other. The main thing is to set things right. The money was only good to show something else that was worth a good deal more than the money—and that was a good feeling. A—a strong and enduring feeling,” emphasized Ho Ha. “A feeling that’s there’s only one word for, and the word doesn’t express it. Keturah,” he exclaimed, getting up and approaching the woman who kept her back so persistently toward him, “you and I aren’t young any longer. We—we were cheated out of something, or else we cheated ourselves out of something, and it was a good deal. But, Keturah, it isn’t all gone. We didn’t lose everything. We made a mistake, a terrible mistake, but it was only a mistake; it wasn’t an ’ntentional wrong either of us did the other. Keturah, can’t—can’t we just salvage some happiness out of the wreckage?” He was standing close to her now.
Suddenly he put his arm awkwardly and eagerly about her. She had raised her hands to her face, and as she took them away he could see she was crying....
Out of doors, Mermaid, without any definite knowledge of what was going on inside, strained her diplomacy to the utmost to keep young Mr. Hand from entering the yard and passing the living-room windows and even, like as not, entering in quest of food to sustain his strength until supper. Dickie was a tall, thin, light-haired boy with a blond skin of singular freshness and brown eyes of singular alterations. Just now they showed a puzzled impatience with Mermaid’s whims.
“Will you go to the dance with me this evening?” he demanded.
Mermaid shook her head. “I want you to walk up street with me,” she announced.