Mrs. Heth and Carlisle were to go to New York on the 20th of May, do a few days' preliminary shopping there, and sail on the 26th. Canning's visit lasted till near the middle of the month, running over his allotted two weeks. And deepening intimacy only brought into stronger relief his great advantages of position, antecedents, and experience; only showed Carlisle the more clearly how distinguished, cultivated, and superior a man she had won. With her pride, there came now, it seemed, a certain new humility. She was aware that never in the days of the thundering feet had she been so desirous of pleasing Hugo as now: when he was no shining symbol or distant parti, but the exceedingly personal and living man who was so soon to call her to the purple. She caught herself at times, with some amused surprise, in the deliberate processes--editing her vocabulary, manner, and wardrobe, for example, in the light of the preferences she intuitionally read in his eye. So, as the husbandly dignity descended upon him, she found herself possessed by something of the wifely duty....
Whenever was this ticklish business of the dovetailing of two lives accomplished without some small mutual effort? No more could be said than that Carlisle felt, in rare and weak moments, a certain sense of strain. An immaterial subtlety this, properly out of the range of mamma's concrete observations. But papa's heart was tender: did he possibly suspect that his darling might feel herself just a little overshadowed at times?
He called Cally into the study one evening before dinner, and with a mysterious air handed over to her a bulky packet of very legal-looking papers.
"Why, papa! What is it?"
"Stock!" answered papa, with a chuckle. "Mostly Fourth National. There's a little more than fifty thousand dollars there in your hand, Cally."
"But--why, papa!... You don't mean it for me!"
"A little weddin' present from your old father. I meant to give it to you next fall, and then I thought, why wait? Had it all put in your name to-day."
"Oh--papa!..."
She threw her arms around his neck, suddenly and oddly touched; not so much by the gift, for she would have plenty of money soon, as by this evidence of her father's affectionate thought.
"Your daughter's your daughter till she becomes a wife...." remarked Mr. Heth. "It won't be that way, will it, Cally, eh?"