“Stuff and nonsense!” cried her brother, as they turned away. “Anne gets worse day by day, Rose. Come. Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, indeed!”
As they went down the steps to the bluff, Anne Lyndsay, her thin white hands in her lap, looked after them. Her face was rarely without a smile; but, as Rose said truly, “Aunt Anne wears her smiles with a difference.” Just now her smile was delicately flavored with a look of satisfied affection. As she looked over river and sun-lit hills, a sharp twinge of pain crossed her face, and her hands shut tight a moment, while the sweat of a brief but overpowering pang wrung from her lips an exclamation. Her life had been physically narrowing for years. As she became less and less able to go here and there, to do this or that, she more and more resolutely broadened the horizon of her mental activities, but, no matter what happened, she continued to smile at or with everything, herself included. Now she wiped her forehead, and fell to smiling again, looking sharply about her, for this woman immensely disliked to be seen in the rare moments when pain was too emphatic for absolute silence. “I wonder why I hate to be seen,” she said aloud, being unusually given to soliloquizing; for, as she liked to explain, “I have more respect for my own opinion if I say it out. It is easier to disregard the unspoken. I like to think I have the good manners to listen to myself. It does so trouble Archie, and that girl, for a day when I break up. I wonder if that small Spartan had had the perpetual company of his fox, how long he would have gone on without squealing. I know he wriggled,” she said, and so fell to laughing, after which she lay back in her chair, waved her handkerchief to Rose, and began to read.
While the Gaspé canoe went away up the stream, urged by skilful arms, Archibald Lyndsay and Rose talked merrily.
“I told those boys to keep their eyes open, and not to come back and tell me they had seen nothing in particular. As for Ned, he is sure to see certain things and not others. He is a dreamer,—oh, worse than ever, my dear,—it grows on him.”
“But his dreams—”
“Yes, I know. There is always something in them. He seems to me, Rose, too absent-minded for this world’s uses. At times he puzzles me. He is the duck in my henbrood.”
“He is pure gold.”
“Yes, but when he comes to be put into current coin,—really, I don’t know. As to Rufus,—Dick, I mean, I hate nicknames, and this family has enough for a directory; you will have six a week,—as to Red-head—”
Rose laughed.
“I get no more respect in this household than—”