“Strauss?” repeated her father doubtfully. He thought the name sounded familiar.
“Mendelssohn, I mean,” corrected she, with the greatest hardihood, and shook a shower of sparkling notes from her finger-ends.
Miss Ellen was one of the progressive damsels of the time.
Mr. Williams looked toward the door, and smiled pleasantly, seeing Miss Yorke come in, and she returned his greeting with one as friendly. There was a feeling of kindness between the two. This gentleman was not very gallant, but, being in his wife’s confidence, and aware therefore that Edith had been looked on by her as a culprit, he had taken pains to make her feel at ease with him. Moreover, in common with a good many other middle-aged, matter-of-fact men, he had a carefully-concealed vein of sentimentality in his composition, and was capable of being deeply interested in a genuine love affair. With a great affectation of contempt, Mr. Williams would yet devour every word of a romantic story at which his daughter would most sincerely turn up her nose. It is indeed on record, in the diary of the first Mrs. Williams, that her husband sat up late one night, on pretence of posting his books, and that, after twelve o’clock, she went down-stairs and found him, as she expressed it, “snivelling over” The Hungarian Brothers. “Which astonished me in so sensible a man as John,” the lady added.
Edith took a chair by a window and looked out into the street, and Mr. Williams turned over the book on his knee. It was a volume of sermons which he was in the habit of pretending to read every Sunday afternoon. Intellectually, Mr. Williams was sceptical; and had one propounded to him, one by one, the doctrines he heard preached every Sunday, and asked him if he believed them, he would probably have answered, “Well, no, I don’t know as I do exactly”; but early education by a mother whose religion was earnest if mistaken, and that necessity for some supernatural element in the life which is the mark of our divine origin, impelled him to an observance of what he did not believe, for the want of something better which he could believe.
When Dick waked again, the first object he saw was his mother’s face, full of tearful joy. She smiled, quivered, tried to speak, and could not.
“Poor mother! what a trouble I am to you!” he said, and would have held his hand out to her, but found himself unable to raise it. He looked, and saw it thin and transparent, glanced with an expression of astonished inquiry into his mother’s face, and understood it all. “I must have been sick a long time, mother,” he said.
She kissed him tenderly. “Yes, my dear boy. But it is all over now, thank God!”
“Poor mother!” he said again. “I must have worn you out. Have you taken all the care of me?”
“No! Edith was here,” she answered timidly. “She is a good nurse, Dick.”