“I mean, of course, did the boys bring home the proper quantum of eyes and fingers?”
“Yes! oh, yes! thank you! they went to bed tired, but whole, I believe.”
“That is fortunate, but remarkable for a Fourth of July report,” said March. “Come, May! Good-night!”
He had seen, without comprehending, the intense relief that flooded the girl’s visage at his sister’s second sentence, also that she was feverishly anxious to have them go. And the sound above stairs, hushed by Hester’s shrill tones—was it low, anguished weeping? The mourner was not Hetty, yet her dry eyes were full of misery. His big, soft heart ached with futile sympathy. By what undiscovered track could he fare near enough to her to make her conscious of this and of a love the greatness of which ought to help her bear her load of trouble?
“Hetty looks dreadfully!” broke out May at the garden gate. “She is worked and worried to death! I am amazed that Mrs. Wayt allows it. To reduce a girl like that to the level of a household drudge is barbarous. She has no time for society or recreation of any kind. It is toil, toil, toil, from morning until night. Mary Ann—the cook mamma got for them—says she ‘never saw such another young lady for sweetness and kindness to servants as Miss Hetty,’ but that she ‘carries all the house on them straight little shoulders of hern.’ Hester tells the same story in better English.”
She repeated what she had heard that evening.
March stopped to listen under the king apple tree, where he had begun to love the subject of the eulogy. While May declaimed he reached up for a cluster of green apples and leaves and pulled it to pieces, his face grave, his fingers lingering.
“Heaven knows, May”—she was not prepared for the emotion with which it was uttered—“that I would risk my life to make hers happy. I hoped once—but you see for yourself how she avoids me. I could fancy sometimes that she is afraid of me!”
“Perhaps she is afraid of herself.”
He looked up eagerly.