“Did you ever see a girl with such sweet ways as your sister?” persisted Lawrence.
“Elmira is a good girl,” Jerome admitted, confusedly. He loved his sister, and would have defended her against depreciation with his life, but he compared inwardly, with scorn, her sweet ways with Lucina's.
“There isn't a girl her equal in this world,” cried her lover, enthusiastically. “Don't you say so, Jerome? You're her brother, you know what she is. Did you ever see anything like that cunning little face she makes, when she looks up at you?”
“Elmira's a good girl,” Jerome repeated.
Lawrence had to be contented with that. He went on, to tell Jerome his plans with regard to the engagement between himself and Elmira. He was clearly much under the wise influence of his mother. “Mother says, on Elmira's account as well as my own, I had better not pay regular attention to her,” he said, ruefully, yet with submission. “She says to go to see her occasionally, in a way that won't make talk, and wait. She's coming to see Elmira herself. I've talked it over with her, and she's agreed to it all, as, of course, she would. Some girls wouldn't, but she—Jerome, I don't believe when we've been married fifty years that your sister will ever have refused to do one single thing I thought best for her.”
Jerome nodded with a puzzled and wistful expression, puzzled because of any man's so exalting his sister when Lucina Merritt was in the world, wistful at the sight of a joy which he must deny himself.
When he went home that night he saw by the way his mother and sister looked up when he entered the room that they were wondering if Lawrence had told him the news, and what he thought of it. Elmira's face was so eager that he did not wait. “Yes, I've seen him,” he said.
Elmira blushed, and quivered, and bent closer over her work.
“What did I tell you?” said his mother, with a kind of tentative triumph.
“You don't know now what Doctor Prescott will say,” said Jerome.