His tone was light, but her heart missed a beat. There was something about this boy so utterly engaging. He had set her on a pedestal, and he worshipped her. When she said that she was not worth worshipping, he told her, “You don’t know——”
She was unusually silent during dinner. With Evans on one side of her and Baldy on the other she had little need to exert herself. Baldy was always adequate to any conversational tax, and Evans, in spite of his monk’s habit, was not austere. He was, rather, like some attractive young friar drawn back for the moment to the world.
He showed himself a genial teller of tales—and capped each of Frederick’s with one of his own. His mother was proud of him. She felt that life was taking on new aspects—this friendship with the Townes—her son’s increasing strength and social ease—the lace gown which she wore and which had been bought with a Dickens’ pamphlet. What more could she ask? She was serene and satisfied.
Adelaide, on the other side of Frederick Towne, was not serene and satisfied. She was looking particularly lovely with a star of diamonds in her hair and sheer draperies of rose and faintest green. “I am anything you wish to call me,” she had said to Frederick when she came in—“an ‘Evening Star’ or ‘In the Gloaming’ or ‘Afterglow.’ Perhaps ‘A Rose of Yesterday’——” she had put it rather pensively.
He had been gallant but uninspired. “You are too young to talk of yesterdays,” he had said, but his glance had held not the slightest hint of gallantry. She felt that she had, perhaps, been unwise to remind him of her age.
She was still more disturbed, when, towards the end of dinner, he rose and proposed a toast. “To little Jane Barnes, A Merry Christmas.”
They all stood up. There was a second’s silence. Evans drank as if he partook of a sacrament.
Then Edith said, “It seems almost heartless to be happy, doesn’t it, when things are so hard for her?”
Adelaide interposed irrelevantly, “I should hate to spend Christmas in Chicago.”
There was no response, so she turned to Frederick. “Couldn’t Miss Barnes leave her sister for a few days?”