The week of Mr. Wadsworth’s vacation ran into two weeks and into a month; Dr. Greyson fell into a friendly habit of calling daily; Mr. Lewis Gesner and Mr. Hammerton came for a chat with him on the piazza as often as every other day, sometimes one of them would pass the evening beside his lounge in the sitting-room. Mr. Hammerton amused him by talk of people and books with a half hour of politics thrown in; and Mr. Gesner with his genial voice and genial manner helped them all to believe that life had its warm corners, and that an evening all together, with the feeble old man on the lounge an interested listener, was certainly one of the cosiest.
“Father, why have you kept Mr. Gesner to yourself all these years?” Tessa asked after one of these evenings.
“I would have brought him home before, if I had known that you would have found him so charming.”
“He is my ideal of the shadow of a rock in a weary land,” she answered; “I do not wonder that his sister’s heart is bound up in him. How can brothers who live together be so different?”
“John is well enough,” said her father, “there’s nothing wrong about him.”
“He makes me creep,” said Tessa, vehemently, thinking of a pair of bracelets that Sue had brought to show her that day.
Mr. Wadsworth lay silent for awhile, then opening his eyes gazed long at the figures and faces that were all his world; Mrs. Wadsworth’s chair was at the foot of the lounge, the light from the lamp on the table fell on her busy hands, leaving her face in shadow; Dinah was reading at the table, with one hand pushed in among her curls; Tessa had dipped her pen into the ink and was carelessly holding it between thumb and finger before writing the last page of her three sheets to Miss Sarepta.
“Oh my three girls!” he murmured so low that no one heard.
Mrs. Wadsworth, in these days, was forgetting to be sharp, and hovered over him and lingered around him as lovingly as ever Tessa did.
“Doctor,” said Tessa, standing on the piazza with Dr. Greyson late one evening, “do you think that he may die suddenly?”