“Oh, I know what girls like,” said Stamford with an uneasy laugh. “Something pretty to look at and something good to eat. All alike.”
But Andy did not pause to discuss this view of the feminine nature, and they parted with another constrained nod.
However, on the way to Marshaven, Andy began to wonder if he could stay on at Gaythorpe when Elizabeth came to the Manor, and Mr. and Mrs. Stamford had retired to the Dower Lodge, as they intended to do upon their son’s marriage. He began to think he could not endure it. Then he turned a corner and felt on his face the cold, salt air that blows across the flat country near Marshaven, and all the sane manliness in him was stirred into activity again.
Give up his work because the girl he wanted was going to marry some one else and live next door!
Ya-a-a-h! howled the winds in contemptuous protest, across autumn fields where men, all bent with age and toil, were following the plough.
Andy whipped up Tommy and sat very straight in the little cart as the wheels twinkled, merry green and red, through the streets of Marshaven.
Mrs. Dixon with her daughters, the Webster girls, was living in a large bow-windowed house facing the sea, and from her post in an arm-chair on the sunny side of the window she waved to Andy as he went in. He felt how elegant and fashionable she was, when she rose in her tight bodice with her tight curls in perfect order and a bluish bloom upon her nose—just as he had always felt when he came home from school or college and she received him kindly. For women gain the same hold on men by being always in full regimentals as soldiers do upon savages.
“My dear Andy,”—she had always been kind, but now she was doubly kind—“how pleased I am to see you.”
“I thought I must run over to say good-bye, as you were off to-morrow,” said Andy, shaking hands with the girls, who seemed, in this strong morning light off the sea, more especially endowed with eyes and hair and neck than ever.
“We’re not going until the end of the month, now. We’ve changed our minds,” said Phyllis. And she closed her lips in a way which intimated that she was in the habit of making up the family mind.