CHAPTER XVII. TWO MOTIVES
Making vain pretence Of gladness, with an awful sense Of one mute shadow watching all.
“Pooh! the girl is happy enough!”
Mr. Glynde jerked his newspaper up and read an advertisement of steamships about to depart to the West Coast of Africa. His wife—engaged in cutting out a scarlet flannel garment of diminutive proportions (an operation which she made a point of performing on the study table)—gave two gentle snips and ceased her occupation.
She looked at the back of her husband's head, where the hair was getting a little thin, and said nothing. No one argued with the Reverend Thomas Glynde.
“The girl is happy enough,” he repeated, seeking contradiction. There are times when an autocrat would very much like to be argued with.
“She is always lively and gay,” he continued defiantly.
“Too gay,” Mrs. Glynde whispered to the scissors, with a flash of the only wisdom which Heaven gives away, and it is not given to all mothers.
The winter had closed over Stagholme, the isolating, distance-making winter of English country life, wherein each house is thrown upon its own resource, and the peaceful are at rest because their neighbours cannot get at them.
Dora was out. She was out a good deal now; exceedingly busy in good works of a different type from those affected by Sister Cecilia. The winter air seemed to invigorate her, and she tramped miles with a can of soup or an infant's flannel wrapper. And always when she came in she was gay, as her father described it. She gave amusing descriptions of her visits among the cottagers, retailed little quaint conceits such as drop from rustic lips declared unto them by their fathers from the old time before them, and in it all she displayed a keen insight into human nature. At times she was brilliant; which her father noticed with grave approval, ignorant or heedless of the fact that brilliancy means friction. Happy people are not brilliant.