Mrs. Pasmer smiled a little at the literary word, and continued: “But he's very sweet, and he's as good as the day's long, and he's very fond of you, and—I thought you liked him.”
The girl threw up her arms across her eyes. “Oh, how can you say such a thing, mamma?”
She dropped into a chair at the bedside, and let her face fall into her hands, and cried.
Her mother waited for the gust of tears to pass before she said, “But if you feel so about it—”
“Mamma!” Alice sprang to her feet.
“It needn't come from you. I could make some excuse to see him—write him a little note—”
“Never!” exclaimed Alice grandly. “What I've done I've done from my reason, and my feelings have nothing to do with it.”
“Oh, very well,” said her mother, going out of the room, not wholly disappointed with what she viewed as a respite, and amused by her daughter's tragics. “But if you think that the feelings have nothing to do with such a matter, you're very much mistaken.” If she believed that her daughter did not know her real motives in rejecting Dan Mavering, or had not been able to give them, she did not say so.
The little group of Aliceolaters on the piazza, who began to canvass the causes of Mavering's going before the top of his hat disappeared below the bank on the path leading to the ferry-boat, were of two minds. One faction held that he was going because Alice had refused him, and that his gaiety up to the last moment was only a mask to hide his despair. The other side contended that, if he and Alice were not actually engaged, they understood each other, and he was going away because he wanted to tell his family, or something of that kind. Between the two opinions Miss Cotton wavered with a sentimental attraction to either. “What do you really think?” she asked Mrs. Brinkley, arriving from lunch at the corner of the piazza where the group was seated.
“Oh, what does it matter, at their age?” she demanded.