“She’s lovely; she’s stylish! I think you and papa are just awful to her. You’re setting Willie against her, too. Leigh thinks so; he says he’d do anything, he’d die for her!”
Mrs. Carter looked a little startled, but she rallied.
“Leigh’s only eighteen,” she observed dryly. “It’s very easy to die for people at eighteen! You’re impertinent to your mother, Emily. Go up-stairs and study for an hour. Mind you take off those stockings!”
Emily began to cry. She cried easily, large tears rolling out of her light-blue eyes. She went up-stairs looking like Niobe, and she cried all the time she was taking off her stockings.
Mrs. Carter stopped rocking and thought. She thought deeply. Emily’s outburst and Leigh’s devotion were such obvious things, and yet—
She lifted her handkerchief and pressed it against her trembling lips. Was William really being set against his wife? Mrs. Carter was a good woman, and the thought distressed her.
She did not resume her rocking, she sat motionless, looking straight ahead of her, her face red. She was still sitting there when Daniel, returning early from court, stopped at the door and looked in.
“What’s the matter, mother?” he asked pleasantly. “You look out of sorts.”
“Oh, Dan, please come in here a moment; I want to talk to you.”
Daniel looked a little surprised, but he came in obediently, putting a pile of law-books and papers on the table as he sat down to listen. His mother saw the papers.