“Well, it would! Sickening little fool!”
“But what shall we say to people?”
Mrs. Bob Lee made a grimace, kicked a little tufted hassock across the room and sank her voice to honeyed sweetness—“Isn’t it the most romantic thing you ever heard in all your born days? It positively sounds like a story—and it looks like a movie! That gorgeous young mountaineer, worshiping his employer’s daughter, hopelessly, of course, and our blessed little Nancy—she’s always been sort of different, don’t you know, from the run of modern girls, dreamy, idealistic—losing her heart— No, he won’t stay on at the mill. Peter Parker, the junior partner, has a lot of innovations he wants to make, and Cousin ’Gene’s going to put the turtle-doves on ‘Evergreen,’ that big old plantation he took over ten years ago—remember? He’s always wanted to develop it, and it just works out beautifully. Yes, it was a surprise, at the very last, though I had been suspecting for a long time——”
She jumped up and gave herself a brisk shake. “Plain and fancy lying taken in here! Now, you get up and bathe your eyes and powder your nose, Cousin Ada, and put on a fine public front, and I’ll drop in to see you now and then, and we can blow off steam in private.”
Her kinswoman dragged herself off the bed and got feebly to her feet. “I pray God,” she said fervently, “that I shall never have to see him again as long as I live! I could not endure it.” The traditional little dabs of crimson stung on her cheekbones. “And aside from the crushing shame of it for the Family, think of his perfidy! He was betrothed to Glen Darrow—she was to marry him next month, and he was—or he seemed to be—in his savage fashion, quite mad about her.”
“And still is, I’ve no doubt,” Mary-Lou nodded. “That is the ugliest part of it all, Cousin Ada. He merely married that poor little nit-wit Nancy to save his skin. Well, he’s lost Glen, and he’ll see her married to Peter Parker, and I imagine that’ll be the rack for him, but—oh, golly,” she kindled to the thought, “if my Bob Lee was alive he’d manage some nice, natural-looking way to murder him!”
Miss Ada had made herself presentable by the time Glen tapped at her door and told her supper was ready. They went down to the quaintly clever little dining room in silence, and in almost unbroken silence they ate black Phemie’s savory meal. Sometimes Miss Ada pressed her handkerchief to her eyes for an instant, and she took little beyond three cups of extra strong tea, and Glen’s frank and hearty young appetite was in eclipse, but whenever she met her duenna’s eye she smiled faintly and shyly. It was a totally new smile for the doctor’s daughter, and Miss Ada noted that she had put on the dress of pale buff crêpe.
The spinster went upstairs directly they had finished and Glen sat alone in the sitting room. She felt a strange and curious sense of shock, of unreality. She did not seem to hear or to see distinctly; it was as if all the former facts, the tangible things of life, were separated by a daze of distance....
She tried to make herself summon the events of the day in an orderly review—Miss Ada’s fluttering delivery of Peter’s message, and her instant conviction that she was free, Heminway, with his green eye shade and his black alpaca office coat, and his prim, henlike clucking, and Mr. ’Gene Carey’s rage and grief, her own horror over Luke, over the breaking, the shattering, no, the besmirching and befouling of the golden legend which was overlaid, shamelessly, radiantly, with gladness, the amazing, theatric entrance of Luke and Nancy Carey, Peter Parker’s wordless grasp of her hand, Miss Ada’s tearful prostration....
But the events of the day refused utterly to march in line; they serpentined, they hurdled, they paper-chased, they flew dizzily, waving dazzling-bright wings....