This did not seem to be the question troubling her. "Very well," she said at last. The renewed friendliness—or the reservation of judgment of him—which she had let him see again after the interview with her father in the car the morning before, was not absent; it seemed only covered over with responsibilities which came upon her now that she was at home. She was abstracted as they passed through the hall and a man brought Eaton's overcoat and hat and a maid her coat. Harriet led the way out to the terrace. The day was crisp, but the breeze had lost the chill it had had earlier in the morning; the lake was free from ice; only along the little projecting breakwaters which guarded the bluff against the washing of the waves, some ice still clung, and this was rapidly melting. A graveled path led them around the south end of the house.
"Your father is still better this morning?" Eaton asked.
"What did you say?" she asked.
He repeated his question. Was her constraint, he wondered, due to her feeling, somehow, that for the first time in their short acquaintance he was consciously "using" her, if only for the purpose of gaining an immediate view of the grounds? He felt that; but he told himself he was not doing the sort of thing he had refused to do when, on the train, he had avoided her invitation to present him to her father. Circumstances now were entirely different. And as he shook off the reproach to himself, she also came from her abstraction.
"Yes; Father's improving steadily and—Dr. Sinclair says—much more rapidly than it would have been right to expect. Dr. Sinclair is going to remain only to-day; then he is to turn Father over to the village doctor, who is very good. We will keep the same nurses at present."
"Mr. Blatchford told me that might be the arrangement."
"Oh, you had some talk with Mr. Blatchford, then?"
"We introduced ourselves."
Harriet was silent for a moment, evidently expecting some comment from him; when he offered none, she said, "Father would not like you to accept the estimate of him which Mr. Blatchford must have given you."
"What do you mean?"