The room was brilliantly lighted now; and Clam set the salver on the table and brought in the tea-urn; and miserable as she felt, Elizabeth half confessed to herself that her coadjutor up stairs was right. Better this pain than the other. If the body was nothing a gainer, the mind perhaps might be, for keeping up the wonted habits and appearances.
"Ask Mr. Landholm to come down, Clam."
"I did ask him," said the handmaiden, "and he don't want nothin' but biscuits, and he's got lots o' them."
"Won't he have a cup of tea?"
"He knows his own mind mostly," said Clam; "and he says he won't."
"What arrangements can you make for his sleeping up there to- night, Clam?"
"Him and me 'll see to it," responded Clam confidently. "I know pretty much what's in the house; and the best of it ain't too good for him."
So Elizabeth drank her cup of tea alone; and sat alone through the long evening and mused. For still it was rather musing than thinking; going over things past and things present; things future she cared not much to meddle with. It was not a good time, she said, for taking up her religious wants and duties; and in part that was true, severely as she felt them; for her mind was in such a slow fever that none of its pulses were healthful. Fear, and foreboding, for her father and for herself, — hope springing along with the fear; a strong sense that her character was different from what it ought to be, and a strong wish that it were not, — and a yet mightier leaning in another direction; — all of these, meeting and modifying each other and struggling together, seemed to run in her veins and to tell in each beat of the tiny timekeeper at her wrist. How could she disentangle one from the other, or give a quiet mind to anything, when she had it not to give?
She was just bitterly asking herself this question, when Winthrop came in at the open parlour door; and the immediate bitter thought which arose next was, did he ever have any but a quiet mind to give to anything? The two bitters were so strong upon her tongue that they kept it still; till he had walked up to the neighbourhood of her sofa.
"How is my father, Mr. Landholm?" she said rising and meeting him.