There were two pieces of news in it, in both of which Tessa was interested. The school-master was twenty-one years of age, “a lovable fellow, the room grows dark when he goes out of it, and he likes best the books that I do.” This came first, she read on to find that Professor Towne’s mother and sister had come this summer to the house over the way, that Miss Towne was “perfectly lovely” and had been an invalid for fifteen years, not having put her foot to the ground in all that time; she could move about on the first floor, but passed most of her time in a chair, reading, writing, and doing the most beautiful fancy work. She was beautiful, like Professor Towne, but the mother was only a fussy old lady. Her name was Sarepta!
Dinah’s letters were rather apt to be ecstatic and incoherent. Tessa wrote five pages in her book that night and a foolscap sheet to Dinah.
She fell asleep thinking of what Professor Towne had said about her.
XVIII.—MOODS.
All through the month of October she felt cross, sometimes she looked cross, but she did not speak one cross word, not even once; she was not what we call “sweet” in her happiest moods, but she was thoroughly sound in her temper and often a little, just a very little, sharp. Never sharp to her father, however, because she reverenced him, and never to her mother because she was pitiful towards her; she could appreciate so few of life’s best havings and givings, that Tessa could never make her enjoyment less by speaking the thoughts that, at times, almost forced their own utterance; therefore her mood was kept to herself all through the month.
There was no month in the year that she loved as well as she loved October; in any of its days it was a trial to be kept within doors.
She would have phrased her mood as “cross” if she had had the leisure or the inclination to keep a diary; she had kept a journal during the first year of her friendship with Ralph Towne and had burned it before the year was ended in one of her times of being ashamed of herself.
One of the happenings that irritated her was the finding in her desk a scrap of a rhyme that she had written one summer day after a talk with Ralph Towne; she dropped it into the parlor grate chiding herself for ever having been so nonsensical and congratulating herself upon having outgrown it.
It was called The Silent Side and was the story of a maiden wandering in the twilight up a lane bordered with daisies, somebody didn’t come and her eyes grew tired of watching and her heart beat faint with waiting, so she wandered down the daisy-bordered lane! She did feel a little tender over the last lines even if she were laughing over it:
“‘Father,’ she said, ‘I may not say,
But will you not tell him I love him so?”