“Good night,” she said sadly.
He held the reins still lingering.
“Will you ride with me again some day?”
“No, I don’t like to hear you talk.”
Again she went back to her pansies; the innocent pansies with their faint, pure breath were more congenial. As he drove under the maples, he muttered words that would have startled her as much as his tainted breath.
“Do you like it in this world, little pansies?” she sighed.
Her father laid his book within a window on the sill, and came down to her to talk about the buds of the day-lilies; her mother fanned herself with a palm-leaf fan and complained of the heat; Dinah ran down-stairs, fresh and airy in green muslin with a scarlet geranium among her curls, and after standing still to ask if she looked pretty, ran across to the planks to walk up and down with Norah Bird with their arms linked and their heads close together.
Tessa sighed again, remembering the old confidential talks with Laura when they both cared for the same things before she had outgrown Laura. There were so many things in her world to be sighed about to-night; the thought of Felix threw all her life into shadow; Norah and Dinah were laughing over some silly thing, and her mother was vigorously waving the fan and vigorously fretting at the heat and the dust in this same hour in which Felix—her bright, good Felix—was moaning out his feeble strength. She had not dared to ask Dr. Lake how he was; what comfort would it be to know that he was a little better or a little worse? How could she talk to him of her busy life and take him a copy of her book? She was counting the days, also; for in October her book would surely be out.
“You think more of that than you would of being married,” Dinah had said that day.
“So I do—than to be married to any one I know.”