She paused and then went on in another tone. “But I believe you’re right about Canada. I’ll explain it all to the others. We’ll make some kind of arrangement about it. I expect it will have to be your farm, nominally, for a time—until we all know you better. I can feel that you do—that you have taken a tremendous fancy to all of us. I felt it just now, after supper. I was watching you and—oh! well, I knew what you were feeling about my father and mother; and it seemed to be just what I should have liked you to feel. But I don’t think I would give all my money to the hospitals, if I were you. Not without thinking it over a bit, first. Wait until we get to Canada and see—how we get on.”
“You don’t trust my impulses,” I said.
She laughed. “Wait till to-morrow anyway,” she replied.
And as she spoke I heard far away, across the Park, the sound of the stable-clock at the Hall, striking twelve. The artificial sound of it was mellowed and altered by distance; as different from that theatrical first striking I had noticed in the exciting atmosphere of the crowd, as was my present state of mind from that in which I had expectantly waited the coming of romance….
“To-morrow begins now,” I said.
“And I have to be up before six,” she added, in the formal voice she knew so well how to assume.
I felt as though she had by that one return to civility cancelled all that she said, and as we turned back to the house, I began to wonder whether the promise of my probation was as assured as I had, a minute earlier, so confidently believed.
We were nearly at the little porch that would for ever be associated in my mind with the fumbling figure of Frank Jervaise, when she said,
“One moment. I’ll get you something,” and left me standing in almost precisely the same spot from which I had gazed up at her window the night before.
She returned almost immediately, but it was not until we were inside the house and she had lighted my candle that she gave me the “something,” pressing it into my hand with a sudden delicious, girlish embarrassment.