She went up and kissed her mother. She seemed rather fatigued than distressed, and her father asked her. “Are you going to bed, my dear?”
“Yes, I’m pretty tired, and I should think you would be, too, poppa. I’ll speak to poor Boyne. Don’t mind Lottie. I suppose she couldn’t help saying it.” She kissed her father, and slipped quietly into Boyne’s room, from which they could hear her passing on to her own before they ventured to say anything to each other in the hopeful bewilderment to which she had left them.
“Well?” said the judge.
“Well?” Mrs. Kenton returned, in a note of exasperation, as if she were not going to let herself be forced to the initiative.
“I thought you thought—”
“I did think that. Now I don’t know what to think. We have got to wait.”
“I’m willing to wait for Ellen!”
“She seems,” said Mrs. Kenton, “to have more sense than both the other children put together, and I was afraid—”
“She might easily have more sense than Boyne, or Lottie, either.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Kenton began. But she did not go on to resent the disparagement which she had invited. “What I was afraid of was her goodness. It was her goodness that got her into the trouble, to begin with. If she hadn’t been so good, that fellow could never have fooled her as he did. She was too innocent.”