“Listen to Amy clamoring for unhappiness!” John Paul commented. “Don’t worry, my child; you’ll get your share. There’s enough to go round, I’ve noticed.”
Mrs. Paul laughed, but a note of reality had come into the careless talk that gave her a sense of being a third party.
“John, you are flippant,” she said; “come, let’s leave these two poor things alone; they’re dying to get rid of us. And besides, if Amy is going to confess her sins since she was one year old, it will take time.”
“That I consider a most uncalled for reference to my twenty-seven years,” Amy retorted; “and besides, I’ve two more notes to write.”
“And I must go home,” William West said, rising in a preoccupied manner.
“Why—but I thought you were going to stay to dinner!” Mrs. Paul protested, with dismay.
“Oh, you must stay to dinner,” Amy urged.
But her lover was resolute. Nor did he, as usual, try to lure her out into the hall that he might make his adieus. He said good-night, stopped a moment to discuss with his senior warden something about the appropriation for repairs at St. James, and then, with a sober abstraction deepening in his face, went home through the delicate June dusk, which was full of the scent of the roses that grow behind the garden walls of the old-fashioned part of Mercer.