“Oh, Jerome, do you suppose it's any use—do you suppose she will?” Elmira cried out, in a kind of incredulous pity.
“I know she will.”
“Did she say so—did she say she would wait? Oh, Jerome!”
“Do you think I would bind her to wait?”
“But she must have owned she liked you. Did she?”
“That's between her and me.”
“Don't you feel afraid that she may turn to somebody else? Don't you, Jerome?” Elmira questioned him with a feverish eagerness which puzzled him.
“Not with her,” he answered.
Elmira felt comforted by his faith in a way which he did not suspect. It strengthened her own. Perhaps, after all, Lawrence would not care for Lucina; perhaps he would work and wait for her, as, indeed, he had vowed to do. After that Elmira worked over the herb-beds with her face to the road. When Belinda Lamb reported that Lawrence and Lucina had been out riding, and Ann said, with a bitter screw of her nervous little face, “Fish in shallow waters bites easy, especially when there's gold on the hook,” she was not much disturbed.
Ann fully abetted her daughter in her resolution to dismiss her suitor, after his father's manifestation. “I guess there's as good fish in the sea as ever was caught,” said she, “and I guess Doctor Seth Prescott 'll find out that. If there's them he don't think fit to tie his son's shoestrings, there's them that feels above tyin' 'em.”