“Let us not speak of the plan until after tea,” Polly whispered, as her father and mother walked forward to meet them.
Polly slipped her hand in her father’s and they went swinging along hand in hand back to the house.
Mrs. Webster walked more slowly with Bettina keeping beside her. She was still unchanged from our Mollie O’Neill, except that there were a few gray hairs which had come when her children were ill. She was plump, of course, but then soon after her marriage Mollie had settled down to the serenities of life, and they had kept her eyes as blue and her skin as soft and rose-colored as ever.
She enjoyed being solicitous about some one’s health and at present was much concerned about Bettina’s. But she was more concerned later because, when supper time arrived, one of her sons had not come in. And this was Billy Webster, who was not in the least like his father—the Billy Webster of other days. This Billy was always in the habit of doing all the things he should not, and Dan, all the things he should. And Mollie might have remembered that this difference in her twin sons was not unlike her own and her sister’s behavior in other days. But they had had no father to guide them and her husband was strict with his sons.
Ralph Marshall—the other visitor at the farm whom the girls had passed in the woods—was having dinner with other friends, and for this Bettina at least was grateful.
Yet the meal was not so agreeable as usual. Bettina and Polly were too silent and too absorbed, Mrs. Webster was plainly nervous and Dan, who was like her in almost every way, shared her emotion.
“It would not be a propitious evening for persuading her father to see things as she wished him to,” Polly thought. But Billy was always the family difficulty.
Half an hour later he had not yet appeared in the library. Neither had Polly or Bettina broached the subject on both their minds, although Polly sat on the arm of her father’s chair reading the same book with him.
Better than any one, she understood her father. He would not show anxiety; but until Billy came in he would not be able to give his attention to anything else, and his reading was only a pretense.
Then, just a few moments after half-past eight, there was an unexpected noise along the drive leading up to the front door.