There was a moment’s awkward silence, and then the school-teacher began hurriedly to speak. “I saw you were alone from the veranda—I was so nervous it never occurred to me to rap—the curtains being up—I—I walked straight in.”
As if in comment upon this statement, M’rye marched across the room, and pulled down both curtains over the veranda windows. With her hand still upon the cord of the second shade, she turned and again dumbly surveyed her visitor.
Esther flushed visibly at this reception, and had to choke down the first words that came to her lips. Then she went on better: “I hope you’ll excuse my rudeness. I really did forget to rap. I came upon very special business. Is Ab—Mr. Beech at home?”
“Won’t you sit down?” said M’rye, with a glum effort at civility. “I expect him in presently.”
The school-ma’am, displaying some diffidence, seated herself in the nearest chair, and gazed at the wall-paper with intentness. She had never seemed to notice me at all—indeed had spoken of seeing M’rye alone through the window—and now I coughed, and stirred to readjust my poultice, but she did not look my way. M’rye had gone back to her chair by the stove, and taken up her mending again.
“You’d better lay off your things. You won’t feel ’em when you go out,” she remarked, after an embarrassing period of silence, investing the formal phrases with chilling intention.
Esther made a fumbling motion at the loop of her big mink cape, but did not unfasten it.
“I—I don’t know what you think of me,” she began, at last, and then nervously halted.
“Mebbe it’s just as well you don’t,” said M’rye, significantly, darning away with long sweeps of her arm, and bending attentively over her stocking and ball.
“I can understand your feeling hard,” Esther went on, still eyeing the sprawling blue figures on the wall, and plucking with her fingers at the furry tails on her cape. “And—I am to blame, some, I can see now—but it didn’t seem so, then, to either of us.”