"Why, East! You know. I told you ages ago," Nannie explained.
"Elizabeth and I are going to stay with Mrs. Richie at the seashore."
"You never said a word about it," Blair said disgustedly. His annoyance knew no disguise. "I call it pretty shabby for you two to go off! What's going to happen to me?"
"Business, Blair, business!" Elizabeth mocked. But Nannie was plainly conscience-stricken. "I'll not go, if you'd rather I didn't, Blair."
"Nonsense!" her brother said shortly, "of course you must go, but—" He did not finish his thought, whatever it was; he went back to the piano and began to drum idly. His face was sharply annoyed. That definition of his god which he had made to his mother, had aroused a nameless uneasiness. It occurred to him that perhaps he was "picking a pocket," in finding such emphatic satisfaction in Elizabeth's society. Now, abruptly, at the news of her approaching absence, the uneasiness sharpened into faintly recognizable outlines.
He struck a jarring chord on the piano, and told himself not to be a fool. "She's mighty good fun. Of course I shall miss her or any other girl, in this Godforsaken hole! That's all it amounts to. Anyhow, she's dead in love with David." Sitting there in the hot dusk, listening to the voices of the girls, Blair felt suddenly irritated with David. "Darn him, why does he go off and leave her in this way? Not but what it is all right so far as I am concerned; only—" Then, wordlessly, his god must have accused him, for he winced. "I am not, not in the least!" he said. The denial confessed him to himself, and there was an angry bang of discordant octaves. The two girls called out in dismay.
"Oh, do stop!" Elizabeth said. Blair got up from the piano-stool and came over to them silently. His thoughts were in clamoring confusion. "I am not," he said again to himself. "I like her, but that's all." There was a look of actual panic on his lazily charming face. He glanced at Elizabeth, who, her head on Nannie's shoulder, was humming softly: "'Oh, won't it be joyful—joyful-joyful—'" and clenched his hands.
He was very silent as he walked home with her that night. When they reached her door, Elizabeth looked up at the closed shutters of Mrs. Richie's house, and sighed. "How dreary a closed house looks!" she said. "I almost wish Uncle would rent it, but he won't. I think he is keeping it for Mrs. Richie to live in when David and I settle down in Philadelphia."
Blair was apparently not interested in Mrs. Richie's future. "I wish," he said, "that I'd gone to Europe this summer."
"Well, that's polite, considering that Nannie and I have spent our time making it agreeable for you."
"I stayed in Mercer because I thought I'd like a summer with Nannie," he defended himself; he was just turning away at the foot of the steps, but he stopped and called back: "with Nannie-and you."