"You may say that, my dear." Mr. Kirke laid a caressing hand upon her head. "Your sister and I would hear the slander from no one else."
Miss Kirke said nothing,—only smiled in a slow, bright way, peculiarly her own. While Jessie could not speak without action, the blood leaping to cheek and lip as did the fire to her eye and ready retort to her tongue, her sister sat, serene and fair, observant of every want of those about her, graceful in hospitality, hurried in nothing, careful in all she said and did. She must have been twenty-five years old, Wyllys decided, but she would look as young at forty, after the manner of these calm-pulsed blondes. The soft brown hair was put plainly back from her temples; her features were like her father's, Greek in outline, but more delicately chiselled; her eyes were placid mirrors—not changeful depths. Her dress was a dun tissue that yet looked cooler than Jessie's muslin, and her lace collar was underlaid and tied in front with blue ribbon. Mr. Wyllys had an eye—and a critically correct one—for feminine attire, down to the minutest details, and he approved of hers as befitting her age, position, and style.
He noted, moreover, with surprise and approval, that there was not a touch of rusticity in the appointments of the table and the bill of fare. Old-fashioned silver, massive and shining; china that nearly equalled it in value, and cut-glass of the same date, were set out with tasteful propriety upon a damask cloth, thick, snowy, and glossy, and ironed in an arabesque pattern. From the clear soup, to the ice-cream, syllabubs, and frosted cake which were the dessert, each dish bespoke intelligent and elegant housewifery. Yet the only servant he saw was the lumpish girl who had admitted him. She removed and set on dishes without a blunder, decent and prim in a white cape-apron, directed, Mr. Wyllys was sure, in every movement, by the mistress' eyes, unperturbed as these seemed.
Crude brilliancy—mature repose—thus he described the general characteristics of the sisters' behavior, by the time the meal was over. Both were strong, both women of intellect and culture. One was as self-contained as the other was impulsive. He had never before—and his acquaintance with the various phases of American society was extensive—met the peer of either in farm-house or country parsonage.
"I should as soon have looked for rare orchids in a daisy-field," was his figure.
The cousins went out for a walk in the afternoon, a ramble that led them by a zig-zag path, to the summit of Old Windbeam. They had climbed the hugest boulder of his knobby forehead, and sat upon it in the shadow of a low-spreading cedar, smoking the cigar of contentment, and surveying at their leisure the magnificent panorama unrolled beneath them, when Orrin laid his hand upon his friend's knee, with a half laugh that had in it a quiver of wounded affection.
"Why have you left me to find all this out for myself, old fellow? Did you doubt my sympathy, or my discretion?"
Roy did not turn his head, but his fingers closed strongly and lingeringly upon his cousin's.
"I doubted neither. There was nothing I could tell you until very lately. I came to Dundee, last September, to pass my vacation at the hotel in the village below. There were excellent hunting and fishing hereabouts, I had been told, and I brought letters of introduction to Mr. Kirke from Dr. Meriden and Professor Blythe, who were his college friends. Before my return to Hamilton, I asked and obtained his permission to correspond with his younger daughter, confiding to him my ulterior motive for the request. He consented and kept my secret. Our letters were such as friends might exchange, and mine were usually read aloud to her father and sister. When I reappeared here at the beginning of our intermediate vacation ten days ago, she received me without suspicion or embarrassment. She never knew what my real feelings toward her were until last week—the day of the accident. We were walking together when she slipped and fell. In the alarm of the moment, for she nearly fainted with the pain, and I thought the hurt far more serious than it afterward proved to be, I spoke words that could not be misunderstood nor recalled. Not that I would recall them! They secured for me the great blessing of my life."
His voice changed here. Up to this sentence the story was a quiet recitative he might have learned by rote, and uttered at the bidding of one he felt had a right to hear it. The lack of spontaneity did not offend the auditor. He appreciated his cousin's richer and fuller nature sufficiently to understand that the most abundant springs of affection and passion lay too far below the surface to be easily forced into view. He saw, too, that the confession of his wooing and winning was made with pain; that the spirit to whose exceeding delicacy of texture and sentiment few did justice, shrank from the revelation, even to his nearest of kin. He doubted not that when the "alarm" of which Roy had spoken, cleft the sealed stone, the hidden waters leaped to the light with power that swept reserve, humility and expediency before them; that Jessie had listened to pleadings more fervent, to vows more solemn than are poured into the ear of one in ten thousand of her sex.