"Yes; I am sure she did," Mrs. Richie said, heartily; "but dear, you ought not to have—"
Nannie, comforted, said: "Well, perhaps not; considering that I can give it to him. But I didn't know that, you know, when I did it." Pretty much all that day, poor Nannie poured out her full little heart to her kind listener; they sat down together at the office-dining-room table—at the head of which stood a chair that no one ever dreamed of occupying; and Harris shuffled about as he had for nearly thirty years, serving coarse food on coarse china, and taking a personal interest in the conversation. After dinner they went into Nannie's parlor that smelt of soot, where the little immortal canvas still hung in its gleaming gold frame near the door, and the cut glass of the great chandeliers sparkled faintly through slits in the old brown paper-muslin covers. Sometimes, as they talked, the house would shake, and Nannie's light voice be drowned in the roar of a passing train whose trail of smoke brushed against the windows like feathers of darkness. But Nannie gave no hint that she would ever go away and leave the smoke and noise, and just at first Mrs. Richie made no such suggestion. She did nothing but infold the vague, frightened, unhappy girl in her own tranquillity. Sometimes she lured her out to walk or drive, and once she urged her to ask Elizabeth and Blair to come to supper.
"Oh, Blair won't come while you are here!" Nannie said, simply; and the color came into David's mother's face. "I know," Nannie went on, "that Elizabeth thinks Mamma meant that money for David. And she is not pleased because Mr. Ferguson won't make the executors give it to him."
Mrs. Richie laughed. "Well, that is very foolish in Elizabeth; nobody could give your mother's money to David. I must straighten that out with Elizabeth."
But she did not have a chance to do so; Elizabeth as well as Blair preferred not to come to the old house while David's mother was there. And Mrs. Richie, unable to persuade Nannie to go back to Philadelphia with her, stayed on, in the kindness of her heart, for still another week. When she finally fixed a day for her return, she said to herself that at least Blair and Elizabeth would not be prevented by her presence from doing what they could to cheer Nannie.
"But is she going to live on in that doleful house forever?" Robert
Ferguson protested.
"She's like a poor little frightened snail," Helena Richie said. "You don't realize the shock to her of that night when she—she tried to do what she thought Mrs. Maitland wanted to have done. She is scared still. She just creeps in and out of that dingy front door, or about those awful, silent rooms. It will take time to bring her into the sunshine."
"Helena," he said, abruptly—she and Nannie had had supper with him and were just going home; Nannie had gone up-stairs to put on her hat. "Helena, I've been thinking a good deal about your cruelty to me."
She laughed: "Oh, you are impossible!"
"No, I'm only permanent. Don't laugh; just listen to me." He was evidently nervous; the old friendly bullying had been put aside; he was very grave, and was plainly finding it difficult to say what he wanted to say: "I don't know what your reason is for refusing me, but I know it isn't a good reason. You are fond of me, and yet you keep on saying 'no' in this exasperating way;—upon my word," he interrupted himself, despairingly, "I could shake you, sometimes, it is so exasperating! You like me, well enough; but you won't marry me."