“Oh, I do!” cried the little girl.
“Then ask him,” advised Miss Amanda. “That’s the only way to do with Joe Stagg, if you want to get at the truth. Out with it, square, and ask him.”
“Oh, Miss Mandy! would you dare?” gasped Carolyn May.
“It doesn’t matter what I’d dare,” said the other drily. “You go ahead and ask him—and ask him point-blank.”
“I will do it,” Carolyn May said seriously. Afterwards she wondered if that were not the way, too, to settle the difficulty between Uncle Joe and pretty Miss Amanda.
After the child had gone the woman went back into the little cottage, and her countenance did not wear the farewell smile that Carolyn May had looked back to see.
Gripping at her heart was the old pain she had suffered years before, and the conflict that had scared her mind so long ago was roused again. Time, if not the great physician for all wounds, surely dulls the ache of them. Miss Amanda’s emotions had been dulled during the years which had passed since she and Joseph Stagg had broken their troth. Carolyn May—surely with the best intentions in the world—had rasped this wound. The woman sat in the kitchen rocker and wrung her hands tightly as she thought.
How peacefully, how beautifully, her life had begun! She had bloomed into young womanhood and had met every prospect of happiness on its threshold. She had loved and had been loved. She had been as sure of her lover’s heart in those days as she was of her own.
Then had come the crash of all her hopes and all her believing. Too proud to demand an explanation of her lover, too much her father’s daughter to show Joseph Stagg what she really felt and suffered, Amanda Parlow had gone her way, not steeling her heart to tenderness, but striving to satisfy its longings with a work which, after all, she realised was a thankless task.
She lavished her sympathy on the afflicted; but, deep in her soul, she felt no satisfaction in this. She felt that the higher qualities of her nature were not developed. She craved that satisfaction in life which a woman finds in a home, in a husband, and in little children.