“Because she misses you?”
“Yes, because she misses me, and needs me. People think and say—she is not taking good care of me. I wish to prove to them that she is.”
“That is sheer nonsense,” he exclaimed, angrily.
“It is not nonsense that she misses me now that her sister is gone. I never had any sister excepting Marion, but I know it was dreadful for Aunt Affy to lose her sister. If you haven’t helped me to study alone, to depend upon myself, you have been very little help to me.”
“That is true,” he laughed, “but the studying is only a part of what the parsonage is to you.”
“It was my reason for coming, and staying,” she said, simply, flushing and trembling.
“True; I had forgotten that. Yes; it is better for you to go; best for you to go. Come to-morrow and talk it over to Marion and my mother. I will tell them only that you have gone—home, to spend the night.”
He took up his pen, it trembled in his grasp; Judith went out and shut the door that he might not be disturbed.
“I am giving it all up,” she thought, as she pressed a few things into a satchel; “all I was going away to get; perhaps this is the way my prayer for work is being answered.”
They were at supper when she stood in the doorway; Aunt Affy at the head of the table behind the tea-pot and the cups and saucers; her husband opposite her, genial, handsome, satisfied, and Joe, at one side of the round table, tall, fine-looking, with his gray, thoughtful eyes, refined lips, and modest manner. Joe was a son to be proud of, the old people sometimes said to each other.