“I see you are anxious about him,” Mrs. Davenport continued after breakfast. “You are surely not afraid his story will fail to interest us?”
“No, it is not that.”
“It can’t be that he has given up the one he expected to tell us and can think of no other?”
“Oh, no; he is going to tell that one.”
“And you don’t like his choice?”
“He won’t tell me what it is!” Mrs. Davenport put down her embroidery. “Then, Ethel,” she laid with severity, “the fault is yours. When I had been five years married, Mr. Davenport confided everything to me.”
“So does Richard. Except when I particularly ask him.”
“There it is, Ethel. You let him see that you want to know.”
“But I do want to know. Richard has had such interesting experiences, so many of them. And I do so want him to tell a thoroughly nice one. There’s the one when he saved a man from drowning just below our house, the second summer, and the man turned out to be a burglar and broke into the pantry that very night, and Richard caught him in the dark with just as much courage as he had caught him in the water and just as few clothes, only it was so different. Richard makes it quite thrilling. And I mentioned another to him. But he just went on shaving. And now he has gone out walking, and I believe it’s going to be something I would rather not hear. But I mean to hear it.”
At lunch Mrs. Field made a better meal, although it was clear to Mrs. Davenport that Richard on returning from his walk had still kept his intentions from Ethel. “She does not manage him in the least,” Mrs. Davenport declared to the other ladies, as Ethel and Richard started for an afternoon drive together. “She will not know anything more when she brings him back.”