His sympathetic eyes were on her face. “I thought, that you were never troubled about any thing,” he said.
“I am not—when I can help it.”
“I left Sue Greyson up the road looking for you; I could not bring her to meet you, as my carriage holds but one; there was news in her face.”
“Then I will go to hear.”
The light sound of his wheels had died away before she espied Sue’s tall figure coming quickly towards her.
“Oh, Tessa! How could you go so far? Your mother said that you were here on this road, and that I should find you either up a tree or in the brook; I’ve got splendid news! guess! Did you meet Dr. Towne? He stopped and talked to me, but I wouldn’t tell him. He and his mother will know in time. Now, guess.”
“Let me sit down and think. It will take time.”
They had met near the brook at the corner of the road that turned past Old Place; on the corner stood a tall, bare walnut-tree, the gnarled roots covered a part of the knoll under which a slim thread of water trickled over moss and jagged flat stones, and then found its clear way into a broader channel and thence into the brook that crossed one of the Old Place meadows.
These roots had been Tessa’s resting-place all summer; how many times she had looked up to read the advertisement of the clothier in Dunellen painted in black letters on a square board nailed to the trunk; how many times had she leaned back and looked down into the thread of water at the moss, and the pebbles, the tiny ferns and the tall weeds, turning to look down the road towards May field where the school-house stood, and then across the fields—the wheat fields, the corn fields—to the peach orchard beyond them, and beyond that the green slope of the fertile hill-side with its few dwellings, and above the slope the crooked green edge that met the sky—sometimes a blue sky, sometimes a sky of clouds, and sometimes gray with the damp clouds hanging low; thinking, as her eyes roved off her book, of some prank of Rob’s or some quaint saying of Sadie’s, of some little comforting thought that swelled in grandma’s patient, gentle heart, or of something sharp that Sadie’s snappish mother should say; sometimes she would take the sky home for her book and sometimes the weeds and the pebbles and the brook; and when it was not her book it was Felix—poor Felix!—or Dr. Lake, whom she loved more and more every day with the love that she would have loved a naughty, feeble, winsome child; or Mr. Towne, of his face that was ever with her like the memory of a picture that she had lingered before and could never forget, or of his voice and some words that he had spoken; or of her father and his failing strength and brave efforts to conceal it; sometimes a kind little thing that her mother had done for her, some self-denial or shame-faced demonstration of her love for her elder daughter, sometimes of Dine’s changeful moods, and often of the book of George Eliot’s that she was reading, or the latest of Charles Kingsley’s that she was discussing with Mr. Hammerton; thinking, musing, feeling, planning while she picked up a pebble or tore a weed into bits, or wrote a sentence in her pocket notebook! It was no wonder that this gnarled seat was so much to her that she lost herself and lost the words that Sue was speaking so rapidly.
“You are not listening to me at all,” cried Sue at last “I might as well talk to the tree as to talk to you!”