After breakfast. That was Alice’s plan, too, you remember.
Mr. Rolfe, that man of peace, had slept through all the turmoil of the night. “Where is Mary?” asked he, as he seated himself at table, next morning; a question which evoked two simultaneous, though divergent replies: one from Mrs. Rolfe that Mary was rather indisposed, and would hardly be down to breakfast; the other from the Pilgrim, to the effect that her young mistress had gone out, betimes, for a walk. “D’yar she is now,” she added, as Mary’s footsteps were heard in the front hall.
Mr. Rolfe greeted his daughter with a smile of bright benignity. He praised the roses in her cheeks. After all, there was nothing like fresh air and exercise. As she bent over him and kissed him with unusual affection, he patted her cheek; accompanying each tap with a sort of cooing little murmur, which was his way when she caressed him. He was delighted. He couldn’t remember when he had seen her so gay. She must walk before breakfast every morning. What would she have? No doubt her walk had made her ravenous. No? Yes, we all lose our appetites in spring.
But her mother’s eye saw no roses painted by the breath of morning, but a burning flush, rather; and when she took her daughter’s hand in hers, it was icy cold. Her gayety, too, which rejoiced her father’s heart, made her mother’s ache.
Presently, and while our party still lingered around the breakfast-table, Alice came tripping in, fresh and cheery, the very personification of that April which was abroad in the land.
Alice was not long in detecting the hysteria which lurked beneath Mary’s assumed joyousness. What had happened? An acute attack of curiosity, complicated with anxiety, seized upon her; and in less than a quarter of an hour she and Mary stood in the hallway across the street, exchanging a few words with Mrs. Carter.
“Let us go up to my room,” said Alice.
“State secrets, I suppose,” said Mrs. Carter.
“Oh, of course.” And the two girls tripped lightly up the stairs.
“How jolly you are to-day, Mary,” called out Mrs. Carter.