"This is your family, is it not?"
"Yes," he said in a queer curt tone she had never heard him use.
"She is very pretty, isn't she?"
"Yes. They are—spending the summer at an aunt's."
"What a darling little boy!" she said.
Soon after she left, thinking, "I wonder why she is away from him? It isn't a happy reason, I'm sure. . . . I wouldn't stay away from him."
David was thinking much the same thing. The next day the picture was nowhere in evidence.
When he went down-stairs one evening to tell her the plans were complete, she dissembled her excitement and said, "Now you'll be able to get enough sleep." But when, after a few minutes of gay nonsense, he had left her to take her advice, and she thought what success would mean to him, she became very grave and had her first taste of a suspense that grew heavier with each waiting day. . . .
The blind woman was first to see.
There was another dinner at Jonathan's house, by way of celebration of the plans' completion, with music, most of which came from his violin. Esther sung only twice, because that was one of the days when the throat behaved ill. "I've been working it a little too hard," she explained.