"No, my child, nor can I forget their noble father. I wouldn't wound him for the whole world. I love him as—as—yes, I love him as much as I do John, but in a different way, that is all. John was my baby, Joel is my grown-up son. You must never forsake Joel in thought, word, or act. Remember that."
What Tilly answered Joel refused to hear. He was too honorable a man to listen further, and he turned back and with slow, weighty steps reached his home again. He stood in the kitchen doorway, waiting. He heard Tilly and the children coming. They were singing merrily and romping like sprites across the meadow.
"I'm coming! I'm coming! I'll catch you! Boo!" Tilly cried. "Hide from him, darling—hide behind the bushes! Where is she, brother? She must be lost. Oh, there she is!" This was followed by childish screams of delight and the mother's cooing words.
Joel went to meet them, advancing across the yard and taking little Tilly into his arms.
"I know we are late," his wife said, regretfully, "but grandmother came part of the way back, and you know she walks slowly."
"It is all right," Joel said, pressing little Tilly's cheek to his. "It is not very late."
"Well, I'll hurry with the supper," Tilly answered. It was significant, he reflected, that she did not mention then the reception of the startling news by Mrs. Trott. Even while they all sat at the table Tilly failed to bring it up, and a general air of repression brooded over them.
Indeed, the children had been put to bed, the dishes washed, and husband and wife were alone together in the moonlight at the door, and still the subject in the minds of both had been avoided. He wondered if she expected him to mention the matter. Surely she ought to know that it was not exactly the thing that he, a mere outsider, had the right to pry into. An awkward silence fell between them, the sort of silence that surely boded ill for their future harmony of intercourse. Tilly seemed to sense this, and suddenly put her shoulder to the wheel of duty.
"I didn't get to tell grand— I didn't get to tell Mrs. Trott, after all." It was significant that she abruptly discarded a formerly accepted term of endearment. "Mr. Cavanaugh was there this morning for that purpose, so—so the greater part of her excitement was over when I got there."
"But she was happy, of course," Joel got out, well knowing that his remark was an empty one.