The young traveller at her side was too much of a man, even in his state of despair, to have expected a woman to lift his burden. If she did, he did not think of the money she owed him. What he wanted was a soothing touch to be laid on his heart, and the song in which, not six weeks before, he had nearly loved his aunt, did what she did not.
The children had gone upstairs. Mrs. Carew sang through the first verse of the song. As far as she was concerned nothing could have been a greater relief. The sympathy she did not know how to give, the debt she had never discharged, the affection she had for Antony, and her own self-pity, Mrs. Carew threw into her voice, and it shook its tremulo through him.
He breathed devotedly: "Thank you, dear," and raised one of his aunt's hands to his lips.
Mr. Carew had let himself in with his latchkey, and was within a few feet of them as his wife finished her song.
CHAPTER XXI
Neither Antony nor Mrs. Carew had the presence of mind to stir. Mrs. Fairfax said of her brother-in-law that he was a "vain creature whose pomposity stood in place of dignity." Carew, at all events, came upon a scene which he had never supposed would confront his eyes. Before him in his own drawing-room, a whipper-snapper from the South was kissing his wife's hands. To Carew the South was the heart of sedition, bad morals, lackadaisical indolence. What the South could not do for him in arousing his distaste, the word "artist" completed. He said to his wife—
"Is this the way you pass your Sabbath afternoons, Mrs. Carew?"
And before she could murmur, "My dear Henry—" he turned on Fairfax.