Mrs. Berkley had a sense of humour that asserted itself at unsuitable times. She chuckled now.
“Sister Anne, Sister Anne, hast thou really espied Romance from thy window?” she murmured. “Sister Anne, is thy report true of what approaches? But, alas for your little sister Anne’s training, Joan! I can’t join you; they would see me! What do you make out, Joan?”
Joan waved her hand behind her back, signalling to her mother to let her have Sister Anne’s watch tower undisturbed for a few moments.
At last she turned away and came over to her mother, Anne with her; Anne had been frankly watching the conversation in the street, untrammelled by the handicap of adult years.
“Well, of course, Mother, one can’t be sure of such a thing from across the street, looking on at one chance meeting, but it does seem as though our Anne’s keen eyes were not far wrong,” Joan announced. “Kit has an air of profound admiration. I couldn’t say as to Anne Dallas; you can’t tell much about a girl. I wonder! They’ve gone on now, in opposite directions. What a handsome boy Kit is! So manly, carries himself so well! He has the nicest smile I ever saw—except Antony’s! I wonder, I do wonder!”
“Anne is a dear girl,” said Mrs. Berkley. “If it were so—poor Richard Latham!”
“Oh, Mother, you don’t think——” began Joan.
“Anne is a dear girl,” repeated her mother. “Do you suppose it is likely that a lonely, hungry-hearted man like Richard Latham, sitting in darkness all his days, could have such a girl as Anne beside him constantly, writing his poems at his dictation, reading to him in her soft, lovely voice, serving him in countless ways, and not learn to love her? I’ve been hoping it would be so. For why should not Anne Dallas love him? Blindness is rather attractive than forbidding to a girl as sweetly compassionate as Anne. And to take at his dictation his beautiful words, his exquisite fancies, to hear them first of all the world, to come to feel, to know, that you inspired most of them, to write them for him and be the medium through which the world knows them—can you imagine better food for love?”
“Well, now you say it,” admitted Joan, slowly. “But if this attractive Kit, full of charm, young, does come wooing—I wonder! Poor Mr. Latham, indeed!”
“Perhaps we should say poor Miss Anne Carrington?” suggested Mrs. Berkley. “Kit’s aunt would surely take the advent of Anne Dallas hard. She is inordinately proud of Kit, ambitious for him. She has intended him to marry Helen Abercrombie who is intemperately rich in her own right, and is the only child of ex-Governor Abercrombie. Miss Carrington had her here last summer, don’t you remember?”