Loveday sat down by the window and averted her face from us as she began to speak, a wholly unnatural thing for Loveday to do.
“Hiram’s a-comin’ home,” she said, and she imparted this altogether ordinary information in a voice that was strained and shaking. “He ain’t a-goin’ to have no tunin’ spell this spring. He’s a-goin’ to start right off agin with the photographin’ wagon.”
There was a pause in which Octavia and I looked at each other with, I am sure, the same fear in both our minds. Had the family troubles, to use Loveday’s own expression, “flew to her head”?
Why, otherwise, should she make this ado about Hiram Nute’s peregrinations, to which we had been so accustomed from childhood that we paid no more heed to them than to the periodical flights of the wild geese over our heads? Loveday turned her face toward us in a timid way, if such an adjective can possibly be applied to Loveday’s manner. Her eyes drooped and her color wavered—the apple-red which seemed sometimes to have settled upon her high cheek-bones.
“’Pears as if ’twould kind of come handy for me to go with him,” she said.
CHAPTER XIV
WE FIND OURSELVES OWN FOLKS AT LAST
“I’ve kep’ Hiram waitin’ consid’able of a spell,” continued Loveday, in a firmer voice. “I wa’n’t but seventeen when he first come a-courtin’ me, and now I’m risin’ forty. I wa’n’t never one that felt a partickler call to matrimony, nor that thought they had any great tarlent for it. And the Lord ’peared to have filled my hands consid’able full where he’d sot me.”
“Dear Loveday! I should think He had!” murmured Octavia.
My heart was too full for words. I seemed to realize, for the first time, what Loveday had been to us. Groundnut Hill Farm without her was a thing which my imagination failed to grasp. I stared at her in blank dismay.
“It wouldn’t ’pear to be a time to think of marryin’ or givin’ in marriage, when there’s family troubles,” continued Loveday; “not without there was partickler reasons, as you might say. But—but Hiram he kind of needs now to be took care of——”