“Why do you trouble Miss Summerhayes, Ju? It is very interesting for us, but not for—a stranger——”
“That is what I have just been saying, Mr. Harwood.”
“—Who can’t take any particular interest, except just as a wonder and a thing to talk about, in what happens to us?”
Dolff’s hands were thrust to the very bottom of his pockets, his shoulders were up to his ears, his head upon his breast. Gloom and anger and misery were on Dolff’s face. As for Janet, she had stiffened more and more with every word he said, and Julia, who had been clinging, with all a child’s affection, to the arm of her governess, felt herself repulsed and detached, she could not tell how, and protested loudly:
“Janet, because Dolff is disagreeable that’s no reason for shaking me off!”
“I have no intention of being disagreeable,” said Dolff, walking slowly with them. “I only say what every one must perceive to be the fact. We have all supposed there was a miracle to be performed, and Miss Summerhayes was to think of us as if—as if—she was, as you say, Ju, one of the family; but she does not feel like that; our affairs are nothing to her—only something that is odd and makes a story to talk about, as they would be to any other stranger.”
“Oh, if you are going to quarrel!” said Julia, “you had better get it over between yourselves. I don’t like people who are quarrelling. You had better have it out with him, Janet, and then perhaps he will not be so dreadful as he has been all these days.”
“There is nothing for us to quarrel about. I am, as Mr. Harwood says, only a stranger,” said Janet, endeavoring to hold the girl’s hand upon her arm.
But Julia slipped it out and ran indoors, not without a thought that she had managed matters well. Julia had long ago made up her mind that a romantic attachment between Dolff and Janet would add great interest to her own life, and that the probable struggles of a love that would not run too smooth would be very desirable for a young lady to witness. And Dolff, under Janet’s influence, had been so much “nicer” than Dolff without that. He had stayed at home; he had been ready for anything (though there was always too much of that horrid music), he had not objected even to a round game. It was true that all these domestic pleasures had come to an end since Charley Meredith’s accident. But Julia, in her inexperience, could not see why they might not come to an explanation and “get over it,” and everything go on as before.
Janet did not follow her pupil as she would have liked to do. She consented to the explanation as it seemed necessary, but she neither hoped nor intended that everything should go on as before.