“No,” she answered after a little pause, “I shall not do that any more. I have been thinking all these things over, while I was away from you, and I'm going to do differently, after this. I shall believe that you've acted for the best,—that you've not meant to do wrong in anything,—and I shall never question you or doubt you any more.”
“Isn't that giving me rather too much rope?” asked Bartley, with lightness that masked a vague alarm lest the old times of exaction should be coming back with the old times of devotion.
“No; I see where my mistake has always been. I've always asked too much, and expected too much, even when I didn't ask it. Now, I shall be satisfied with what you don't do, as well as what you do.”
“I shall try to live up to my privileges,” said Bartley, with a sigh of relief. He gave her a kiss, and then he unclasped Kinney's nugget from his watch-chain, and fastened it on the baby's necklace, which lay in a box Marcia had just taken from her trunk. She did not speak; but Bartley felt better to have the thing off him; Marcia's gentleness, the tinge of sadness in her tone, made him long to confess himself wrong in the whole matter, and justly punished by Ricker's contempt and Witherby's dismissal. But he did not believe that he could trust her to forgive him, and he felt himself unable to go through all that without the certainty of her forgiveness.
As she took the things out of her trunk, and laid them away in this drawer and that, she spoke of events in the village, and told who was dead, who was married, and who had gone away. “I stayed longer than I expected, a little, because father seemed to want me to. I don't think mother's so well as she used to be, I—I'm afraid she seems to be failing, somehow.”
Her voice dropped to a lower key, and Bartley said, “I'm sorry to hear that. I guess she isn't failing. But of course she's getting on, and every year makes a difference.”
“Yes, that must be it,” she answered, looking at a bundle of collars she had in her hand, as if absorbed in the question as to where she should put them.
Before they slept that night she asked, “Bartley, did you hear about Hannah Morrison?”
“No. What about her?”
“She's gone—gone away. The last time she was seen was in Portland. They don't know what's become of her. They say that Henry Bird is about heart-broken; but everybody knows she never cared for him. I hated to write to you about it.”