“I should like it if you thought it would be worth the while,” said Estelle, and her face lighted.
“Why, of course. I’ll send Bilkins up at once,” said Cyrus, genially.
“That’s very kind of Cyrus,” Estelle remarked, with an air of candor, as we heard him go down the stairs. “But I would rather he would be fair to Dave than kind to me.”
“Have you heard that Rob has come home?” I asked, with a sudden recollection of the news that Leander had brought from the other side of the river. “He is too ill to finish his course at the Preparatory School. It will be a great blow to Uncle Horace.”
Estelle started and her face flushed.
“I’m going over this moment to see Rob!” she said. “I’ve always felt that he knew something about the mystery—if he would only tell!”
I looked after her with wondering pity for her delusion. What mystery could there be except that Dave had been bad enough to leave Rob alone and ill among strangers to go to the races?
CHAPTER VI
LOVEDAY GROWS MYSTERIOUS
Estelle was gone so long that I thought she must have stayed to the one o’clock dinner; twelve or one o’clock dinners were universal in Palmyra. But before we reached our apple dumpling dessert she came in, with a glow that was more than that caused by the frosty air.
Dave didn’t come home to dinner. The distance from the shipyard was too short to be any hindrance, and Cyrus always came, as a matter of course, but Dave said that a workman could not make his toilet in the middle of the day. He said it without the least bitterness; from first to last there never was any bitterness about Dave. Sometimes I thought Cyrus would have a higher opinion of him if he would take his punishment—or his penance—less cheerfully. I suppose we should not have liked Dave to sit at the table in his workman’s clothes, not because he was a workman, but because he was Dave. I always thought, while I ate, of Dave with the cold luncheon which he carried. Cyrus had arranged a way for the workmen to heat their coffee—that was after Estelle insisted upon carrying something hot to Dave. But I think it was Dave himself who stopped her. While he was far from posing as a martyr he was determined to do the real thing, as a workman should.