“She’s so sensitive,” Cyrus tried to excuse her; “you can’t think how sensitive she is, and timid. I never knew anybody so timid! Why, she makes me look under the bed every night, for fear there’s somebody there!”
“Well, next time, tell her ‘two men and a dog’; that will take her mind off your father.” It must be confessed that Dr. Lavendar was out of temper—a sad fault in one of his age, as Mrs. Drayton often said; but his irritability was so marked that Cyrus finally slunk off, uncomforted, and afraid to meet Gussie’s eye, even under its bandage of a cologne-scented handkerchief.
However, he had to meet it, and he tried to make the best of his own humiliation by saying that Dr. Lavendar was shocked at the idea of the Captain being interested in Mrs. North. “He said father had been, until now, as sensible a man as he knew, and he didn’t believe he would think of such a dreadful thing. And neither do I, Gussie, honestly,” Cyrus said.
“But Mrs. North isn’t sensible,” Gussie protested, “and she’ll—”
“Dr. Lavendar said ‘there was no fool like a middle-aged fool,’” Cyrus agreed.
“Middle-aged! She’s as old as Methuselah!”
“That’s what I told him,” said Cyrus.
By the end of April Old Chester smiled. How could it help it? Gussie worried so that she took frequent occasion to point out possibilities; and after the first gasp of incredulity, one could hear a faint echo of the giggles of forty-eight years before. Mary North heard it, and her heart burned within her.
“It’s got to stop,” she said to herself, passionately; “I must speak to his son.”