"I will speak to her," Langley would answer, quietly, while the girls interchanged looks of confusion and dismay. Queenie's discomfiture and disappointment were too obvious one day to escape notice. Garth, who was really annoyed, and had been complaining in no very measured terms, caught sight of the girl's crimsoned face, and at once held his peace. But the next day he marched into the kitchen, and found Susan and her coadjutors at work.
It was really a picturesque sight. The girls had rolled up their sleeves in imitation of Susan, and the round dimpled arms were very white and pretty; the coarse bib-aprons could not disguise the slim figures. Cathy had tied a handkerchief over her dark hair; she looked like a young Zingara as she walked across the kitchen, flourishing her basting-ladle; she was stirring some savory mess in a great iron pot. "Far over hill and dale freely we roam," sang Cathy. "Queen, I am sure this will be a success, it smells so good."
"Hush! here comes your brother," ejaculated Queenie. The smooth rolling-pin slipped out of her hand; the sunshine streamed through the window on the red brick floor, and the white table heaped up with ripe fruit, with great golden plums and clusters of red cherries. One level beam had touched the girl's brown hair with gold; her coarse apron enveloped her. She looked like Cinderella before her pumpkin chariot arrived.
"So I have two new cooks, have I?" laughed Garth, as he lounged against the doorway. What a pretty picture it was—the low dark kitchen never looked so inviting before. He made Cathy bring him some cider, and then helped himself to some of Queenie's fruit. Queenie picked him out the juiciest plums with her long white fingers; they had quite a little feast together, the girls waiting on him. Before he went away Queenie had finished rolling out her dough; the tarts were all in the oven before Susan's testy hints were taken, and she had her kitchen to herself.
In the afternoons they sat over their work with Langley in some shady corner of the garden. Sometimes, but not often, Miss Faith joined them.
"Cara does not want me, and so I have come up for an hour," she would say. Her quiet eyes would brighten, and a tinge of color would come into her face, at the sight of the little party gathered on the lawn. Sometimes Garth would be there, stretched on the crisp short grass at Langley's feet, with his paper or his book beside him. He always started up, well-pleased, at the sight of his favorite.
"Miss Charity cannot always have you; other people want you too," he would say, as he brought out another low basket-work chair, and gathered her a rose or two, for Miss Faith had a passion for flowers. Garth dealt in these chivalrous little attentions; it pleased him to tender these sort of offerings to the women he delighted to honor. "You are my patron saint," he would say to her, as he laid the flowers beside her. "Faith is very necessary to us all, but you never seem to remember that," with almost an affectionate intonation in his voice.
"I am only necessary to Cara," she would answer sadly. She took Garth's little speeches, his flowers, his kind looks, as simply as they were offered. To the quiet woman of thirty-five, who had no life of her own to live, and who had laid her own shadowy hopes, her unspoken desires, on the shrine of stern duty, there was nothing suspicious or incongruous in Garth's devotion; he liked her, and she was fond of him. Any other thought would have been impossible to either of them.
Cathy once hinted at this.
"Garth cares for Miss Faith more than for any other woman; he always has," she said once to Queenie. "I used to wonder, long ago, whether anything else would ever come of it. Men do care for women who are older than themselves sometimes, and though she was never pretty she has such a dear face; but I see now that such a thought would never occur to either of them."