“Dear Mammy Lil, don’t look as if you didn’t know me,” she said, with a sudden little catch in her voice; “I’ve always told you I’m hateful, and you won’t believe it; when I convince you, don’t quit loving me.”
“You silly child,” I answered, patting the red-brown coil of curls; “I’ll never quit loving you, whether I’m dead or alive. But I was afraid you weren’t well.”
She laughed and pecked my cheek.
“I’m well as ever was.—Have Peggy ready, David: I’d like to go sixty miles an hour.—Oh, dear, I’m losing all my hairpins!”
She wasn’t at all. But she caught her hair with both hands, and vanished through one of the long windows. David looked after her with the set look which I had learned to know when he was little more than a baby. Then he, too, kissed me, and walked away, after putting the stand with my bell and a plate of biscuits on it close beside me.
I lay there puzzled and troubled. The rain stopped presently, and I crumbled the biscuits and flung them out on the grass, watching the birds idly.
Promptly at five David drove round with Peggy, his favorite mare, her beautiful head held as high as Caro’s own, and as free from torments of check-rein and blinders. She shone like satin, and stepped with a proud consciousness of her own worth and her master’s confidence in her. David sat chatting with me during the ten minutes Caro kept him waiting. She had on the pale green lawn when she came out, and a most fetching hat which she had herself concocted to go with it. I beheld her adornment with dismay. The lawn was more lace than lawn, and I knew she had planned it for what she called a “partyfied” dress. She usually went driving with David bareheaded, and in whatever garments she happened to have on. Her finery boded him no good; and I realized with a sinking heart that if I had had the wit to keep my astonishment out of my face she would have stuck to her first refusal, and the drive would have been postponed to a more auspicious day. David was riding to disaster—and I had opened the way.
It was almost dark when they came home, and I had been back in bed for some time. Caro came in looking distractingly pretty, and sweeter than a naughty child should. I knew by the lavish bounty of her caresses that she had treated David very badly indeed, and was torn between a desire to take her in my arms and get the whole story out of her, and a wish to set her in the corner till she should return to her normal state of mind. But I remembered what I had promised David months ago, and repressed my itch to meddle. She had always confided in me before, and unless she did now I must be dumb.
David, I did not see until morning. He had brought Caro home and had returned at once to Chatterton, sending me word he had an engagement and would not be at home until after I was asleep. It was after midnight when I heard him come in. This morning he came to my room as usual, but his eyes looked as if he had not slept. I pretended to see nothing, because he wished it.—But what had happened to Caro? If she had been at Cousin Jane’s I might have suspected some mischief-making; but she went only to Grace’s. Whatever caused the change, it goes deep. She has been in her own room all day, and I have not even heard her sing.