"My dearest lamb!" she cried, with a strangled sob, clasping her cousin in her embrace.
"The doctor would come the instant he had swallowed his tea!" she tried to cover Jessie's emotion and her own by saying, when she could speak clearly. "I told him it was barbarously unfeeling and unromantic; that, according to all rules of etiquette and sentiment, you should pass this evening without the intrusion of company. But he was obstinate. I don't believe you two have the remotest conception of his favoritism of you!"
Meantime, the doctor had, in his odd fashion, slipped his hand under the young wife's chin, and raised to the light a strangely agitated face—eyes swimming in tears, forehead slightly puckered with the effort after self-control, and little eddies of smiles breaking up around the mouth. Roy saw in it the whole history of the shipwreck of her heart and life, and her womanly determination to keep the knowledge of the disaster to herself. Would the physiognomist's keenly solemn gaze detect as much?
Neither of the lately wedded pair was prepared for the remark with which he released the blushing Jessie.
"I wanted to see if the heart of her husband could safely trust in her. My daughter! do you know what a good man you have married?"
"Do not raise her expectations to an unreasonable height, my dear sir!" interposed Roy, in time to forestall her reply. "And let me thank you, in her name and in mine, for the honor you have done us in this early visit."
The doctor accepted the compliment and the chair that the host wheeled forward, in profound silence. The conversation had been carried on by the others for several minutes before he again joined in. He was aroused then by his wife's laudations of Orrin's generosity as displayed in his bridal present.
"I don't see how you can take it so quietly!" she berated the recipient. "One would suppose pianos were given away every day! And you should value the instrument the more highly because it is the gift of your great admirer and true friend, Mr. Wyllys. I assure you, Mr. Fordham, nothing could exceed his care of and devotion to her, for your sake and in your name, of course! while you were over the seas and far away."
"True friend!" echoed the doctor's dryest, most rasping tones. "Humph!"
"Now, my love, I do implore that you will not drag forward that most unjust and unreasonable prejudice in the present company!" cried his wife, in a nervous flutter from her bonnet-crown to her gaiter-tips. "If I have failed to convince you that it is groundless and absurd, oblige me by withholding the expression of it, here and now!"