Their eyes met. She saw that he was deeply stirred by her tenderness, and that opened the floodgates of her sympathy. She began to rub her eyes.
“Oh, Dick, I’m so miser’ble; ef you an’ Marty don’t quit actin’ like you are I don’t know what I will do.”
She saw him make a motion as if he had swallowed something; then he stooped and shouldered the heavy backlog and some smaller sticks.
“I ’ll give you-uns one more backlog to set by, anyhow,” he said, huskily.
She preceded him into the sitting-room and stood over him while he raked out the hot coals and deposited the log against the back part of the fireplace. Then she turned into the kitchen and approached her sister, who was frying meat in an iron pan on the coals.
“Marty,” she said, unsteadily, “ef you begin on Dick I ’ll go off fer good. I can’t stand that.”
Mrs. Wakeman folded her stern lips, as if to keep them under check, and shrugged her shoulders. That was all the response she made.
Lucinda turned back into the sitting-room, where the dining-table stood. To-night she put three plates on the white cloth; one of them had been Dick’s for years. She put it at the end of the table where he had sat when he was the head of the house. As she did so she caught his shifting glance and smiled.
“I want to make you feel as ef nothin’ in the world had happened, Dick,” she said. “I’ve been a-fixin’ you a bed in the company-room, but you jest must be sensible about that.”
“Law! anything will suit me,” he began. But the entrance of Marty interrupted his remark.