Sarepta read this next morning, and sniffed.
"What did the man expect?" she asked of Kitty, who had brought the paper out to her. "What d'he think I'd been doin' for forty years? The idea!" but she cut the item out none the less, and pasted it in her scrapbook.
So Judge Peters won the lady of his faithful heart, and carried her off for a summer in Europe: (there was a Europe in those days, not yet become a place of blood and tears!) "And now," said Cyrus hopefully, "perhaps Kitty will come and live with us!"
To be exact, it was only the Chanter girls and Mr. Mallow who said this. Madam Flynt and the Misses Bygood knew better; so did the bride, who checked her Edward's affectionate hope, expressed to Kitty at parting, with "Nonsense, Ned! Kitty will stay in her own house. She would be a great fool if she didn't."
Kitty cried a good deal after her aunt left. She missed the brusque, incisive speech, the odd, kindly ways. The house seemed very lonely, very silent; though of course it was just as dear. She was so glad they were going to be happy together, those two dear people! There would be no more violets now, she supposed. Ridiculous that here an absurd crystal tear dropped on the shining leaf of the orange-tree Kitty was watering: tears came so easily nowadays, when she was not really sad at all, only—only——
If Tom were really married, what did anything else matter? If he were! Kitty did not actually believe it. There were many people who did not write letters; but to marry, without a word or a line, after—she caught her breath, seeing his face as he took leave of her that day, so long—oh, so long ago!
"I shall find you here when I come back, Kitty? You—you'll wait——"
Some one came in: next moment he was gone. That was all. If he were really married——
The curious thing was, songs came as easily as tears. She had not sung since her mother's death, till just lately; but now, for all her sadness, which of course was not really sadness, song bubbled within her like a fountain. "The Duke of Lee" was on her lips all day long: it possessed her; she could not drive it away. She tried to do so by a severe course of scales, singing her solfeggi twice a day religiously; taking up, too, the Italian arias and canzonetti that her mother had loved to hear her sing, and the Scotch ballads she used to croon to her father when he came in from a long drive and sat on the leather sofa before the sitting-room fire. There was nothing wonderful about Kitty's voice, but it was very sweet, and had a harp-like quality that thrilled one strangely somehow.
She set herself a stiff little course of reading for the evening, when of course she would miss Aunt Johanna most. Plato to begin with; she had always meant to read Plato; then she would take Herodotus, and Josephus, and all the things she had never "got round to." It would be wonderful! she thought. If she kept at it steadily, by the time she was fifty, she might really begin to know just a scrap, "instead of being a Pit of Ignorance, Pilot, as I always have been; just like you, my lamb; heigh ho!