"Thank you," he said, and pressed her fingers more firmly for an instant and then released them. He had taken his glove off in the hall and had not replaced it. When they reached the door of her father's house, she suddenly grasped his ungloved hand and kissed it, and ran sobbing up the steps and into the house without a word.
"Poor girl," thought Avery, "she is not herself to-night. She has never respected nor loved her father much, but this was a phase of his nature she had not suspected before. Poor child! I hope Gertrude—" and in the selfishness of the love he bore for Gertrude, he allowed his thoughts to wander, and it did not enter his mind to place anything deeper than a mere emotional significance upon the conduct of the intense, tall, dark-eyed girl who had just left him.
He did not dream that at that moment she lay face down on her bed sobbing as if her heart would break, and yet, that a strange little flutter of happiness touched her heart as she held her gloved hand against her flushed cheek or kissed it in the darkness. It was the hand Avery had held so long within his own, as it lay upon his arm. At last the girl drew the glove off, and going to her drawer, took out her finest handkerchief and lay the glove within, wrapping it softly and carefully. She was breathing hard, and her face was set and pained. At two o'clock she had fallen asleep, and under her tear-stained cheek there was a glove folded in a bit of soft cambric. Poor Francis King! The world is a sorry place for such as you, and even those who would be your best friends often deal the deadliest wounds. Poor Francis King! Has life nothing to offer you but a worn glove and a tear-stained bit of cambric? Is it true? Need it be true? Is there no better way? Have we built your house with but one door, and with no window? Smile at the fancies of your sleep, child; to-morrow will bring memory, reality, and tears. You are a woman now. Yesterday you were but an unformed, strong-willed girl. Poor Francis King! sleep late to-morrow, and dream happily if you can. Poor Francis King, to-morrow is very near!
XI.
Gertrude!" called out her mother to the girl, as she passed the library door. "Gertrude! come in, your father and I wish to talk with you."
"Committee meeting?" laughed Gertrude, as she took a seat beside her father. It had grown to be rather a joke in the family to speak of Mr. Avery's calls as committee meetings, and Mr. Foster had tried vainly to tease his daughter about it.
"In my time," he would say, "we did not go a courting to get advice. we went for kisses. I never discussed any more profound topic with my sweetheart than love—and perhaps poetry and music. Sometimes, as I sit and listen to you two, I can't half believe that you are lovers. It's so perfectly absurd. You talk about everything on earth. It's a deal more like—why I should have looked upon that sort of thing as a species of committee meeting, in my day."
Gertrude had laughed and said something about thinking that love ought to enter into and run through all the interests of life, and not be held merely as a thing apart. All women had a life to live. All would not have the love. So the first problem was one of life and its work. The love was only a phase of this. But her father had gone on laughing at her about her queer love-making.
"Committee meeting?" asked she, again, as she glanced at her father, smiling dryly. Her mother answered first.