“He spoke slightingly of you, did he! The——”
He choked down an unscriptural epithet.
Mabella nudged Vashti gleefully. Sidney managed to give the girls a look of sympathetic congratulation over his shoulder. But Vashti’s face was still sombre. She knew her father far too well to think he would be consistently inconsistent. Lanty would have his bad half-hour, irrespective of this raging. The Lansings were essentially illogical. It was a common saying in the neighbourhood, that calculating upon a Lansing was like catching a flea: when you thought you had him he wasn’t there!
“What did you think when Dr. Clement gave you my invitation?” asked old Lansing.
“I was simply delighted,” said Sidney; “you know I did not feel that I would be coming among strangers. My dear old dad spoke very often of the Lansings, and you in particular.”
“Yes—he wanted sister Mabella, her mother there; we quarrelled, sister and me, over that matter. She would have her cousin Reuben and nobody else. Poor things! Neither the one nor the other of ’em lived long. We Lansings are great on marrying cousins,” he said half apologetically, suddenly remembering it was this young man’s father who had been slighted.
Both the girls blushed, but the blush died unseen upon the cheeks of each. For neither searched the countenance of the other. How blindly we stumble towards our own desires—unheeding the others who seek the same treasure till a hand plucks it away from before us, and then with empty hands we brush the mists from our eyes, and see how, led by fatuous delusion through perilous places, we have come to the ashes! But the ashes are never so dead that eager breath may not blow them into that Phoenix flame whence Hope is born.
“My father told me all the old stories of his boyhood,” said Sidney. “I have heard of all your adventures together.”
“So have we,” said Mabella. “Do you know the story of how a streamer of crape was tied upon the door of the old church the night the Independents opened theirs?”
“Yes, indeed,” said Sidney, laughing. “My father related that exploit of Mr. Lansing’s many a time.”