Mrs. Payne’s wide-eyed, “Why shouldn’t she be? Ellen’s so sweet and pretty,” collapsed the older lady’s anger like a pricked balloon, as nothing else could have done. Ellen’s picture of her is this: “Aunt Sarah flopped down, she didn’t sit, and gathered her draperies around her like a wounded Roman matron.”
Roger, at Mrs. Payne’s words, again put his arm around Ellen and laughed aloud. He adored their unworldliness. The bad little boy in him vanished; so did the man of the world who cannot bear generosity in the beloved. He spoke truly enough when he said all the best things in him ran out ahead of him to meet Ellen. He said to Miss Sarah gently:—
“You see, we really care for each other, Aunt Sarah, and I’m awfully sorry about putting you in a false position, but that doesn’t count very much compared to Ellen’s and my happiness, does it? Please believe me when I tell you that your side of this never occurred to me and so I’ll take myself away to-night.” The moment of high-sounding periods was over.
“Hadn’t you better stay?” asked Miss Sarah. “Think of the talk, Roger.”
“I want talk,” he said,—“all the talk in the world; I would like everybody to know how I care for Ellen—I welcome gossip.”
“The way he laughed”—wrote Ellen—“made one feel the way Spring looks; I was so proud, and wondered more than ever what I could have done to have any one like Roger love me.”
During the days when they had been at odds with life, they had taken pains to have me with them; it was the first time that they had shown themselves eager for my company together. I had been confidante first for Ellen and then for Roger, and then again for Ellen, but seldom had I seen them both at once. Now, after this explanation with Miss Grant, they unconsciously thrust me aside with no more regard for me than if I had been a withered flower. I was going to Ellen’s to help with the sewing. I had left her a little lack-luster, a little wistful; Roger had been sulky and inclined to cynicism; and now they swept down on me like a splendid young god and goddess, no longer making any effort to keep the town in ignorance; they took it in in a magnificent gesture, the way they looked at each other; shouted it aloud, and, as though to carry out in very truth the words he had spoken to Miss Grant when he said he would like to shout through the town that he loved Ellen, he took her hand in his when he saw me and swung it to and fro; and in my day such an action as this was one which would cause the quiet windows to bristle with interrogatory eyes. You might be perfectly sure that there would be quiet slippings through back doors and gossiping under grape arbors.
That evening I met Roger coming down the street and he stopped to tell me:—
“We’ve had it out with Aunt Sarah, and both Aunt Sarah and I have written to my mother. Now we’ll soon have an end to this shilly-shallying.”
“And if your parents don’t like it?”