“Where is your father?” inquired Tessa, standing on the threshold of Sue’s chamber.
“In the dining-room drying his feet and drinking a cup of coffee.”
“Don’t you want to go down and say good night? He will lose every thing when he loses you.”
Sue hesitated. “I don’t know how to be tender and loving, I should make a fool of myself; he isn’t over and above pleased with this thing anyway; he never did pet me as your father has petted you. Your father is like a mother. He said once when I was a little girl that he wished that I had died and Freddie had lived; Freddie was two years older and as bright as a button. Father loved him. I shall never forget that; I shall never forgive him no matter how kind he is to me. And he swears at me when he is angry with me; he used to, but Gerald told him that he should not swear at his wife! Father said that he didn’t mean any thing by it. Gerald will be kinder to me than father has been; father swears at me in one breath and calls me the comfort of his old age in the next. You can’t turn him into your father if you talk about him all night.”
“But he will be glad if you go down; he will think of it some day and so will you.”
“He isn’t sentimental and I can’t be. Besides I have some things to put into my trunk, and I want to put a ruffle into my wrapper that I may have it all ready. It’s eleven o’clock now; we shall not be asleep to-night.”
Tessa urged no more; it was not her father who was drying his feet and drinking his coffee down-stairs alone on the night before her wedding day. How he would look at her and take her into his arms with tears.
Sue opened her trunk. “Gerald’s things are all in. It does seem queer to have his things packed up with mine. And when we come home every thing will go on just the same only I shall be Mrs. Lake instead of Miss Greyson.”
As Tessa stood behind her arranging her hair, She said, “There, I like that. I almost look like Nan Gerard. What do you think she said to-day? She was here with Mary Sherwood to see father and they saw Mr. Ralph in my album. ‘That’s the man I intend to marry,’ she said, ‘eyes, money, and all.’ Mary scolded her but she only laughed. She said that if she couldn’t get him, she should take the professor, for he was just as handsome and could talk about something beside paregoric and postmortem examinations.”
Tessa said nothing. How she had pitied Nan Gerard, and how harshly she had misjudged Dr. Towne. She was awakened in the night by Sue’s voice—