Now telegrams addressed to Miss Bathsheba Dill might have been as thick as leaves in Vallambrosa for all the agitation Cyrus showed; but as for me, the blood rushed to my head and for an instant Alice Yorke, on her tilter seemed to be leading a race into the river.
I heard, as in a dream, Dave say, “Will you have some coffee, Miss Yorke?” and noted vaguely that he was just as gallant and graceful as if the cup were not old and cracked. And then, although my hands shook like a leaf, I was face to face with the first telegram of my life.
“The best design. I think a great thing. Salter will write your brother.
“E. Carruthers.”
My heart leaped for joy. The best design! A great thing! I wanted to shout it out to the four winds of heaven, but that provoking Dave had sat down beside Alice Yorke and they were making merry over their lunch. He had left the basket with another cracked cup and a tin can at our end of the pile, and the coffee-pot was set down midway, but so shakily that it seemed likely to tip off.
“Bathsheba, if you want some coffee you shall have my cup in a minute,” he called to me. “I’ll wash it in the river.”
Cyrus made a feint of eating a little; it was easy to see that it was hard work. I wished that Dave would not monopolize Alice Yorke, in that boyish, ridiculous way, for I thought her brightness might make Cyrus forget his care.
Dear old Cyrus! The softness he had shown in making Dave’s coffee had drawn me to him with a new tenderness; after all Cyrus was my own brother. He looked so forlorn, too, with his long, lank figure huddled awkwardly upon the pile of boards and making a pitiful attempt to assume the light-minded air appropriate to the occasion.
“Gay youth loves gay youth,” I said to myself, but nevertheless I was irritated by Dave and Alice Yorke.
Cyrus had rather held aloof from Alice than otherwise since Dave had come home, and yet I thought his interest in her was different from that which he had ever shown in any other girl.