“At all events,” said young Eric Chartres, with the most charmingly abashed smile, “I’m not crying.”
Bit by bit this logical climax of the Summer’s situation was imparted to us—indeed, Pelleas and I had already secretly prophesied it. For Dudley Manners to have charge of little Lisa at all was sufficiently absurd; but for him with his middle-aged worldliness to have in keeping her love story was not to be borne. Lisa and Eric had been betrothed since Spring and in those two months Dudley Manners’ objection on the score of their youth had not been to any extent outgrown. Moreover, Lisa explained tremulously, Uncle Dudley had lately given out that she had not yet “seen the world.” Therefore he had taken passage for her and a Miss Constance Wortley, a governess cousin at Chynmere Hall—elderly and an authority on plant life in Alaska—and they were to go abroad to see the world for two years; and Eric was of course to be left behind.
“Two years,” Lisa said impressively, with the usual accent of two eternities; “we were to go to the north of Africa to watch the musk roses bloom and to the Mediterranean to look for rosemary. Uncle Dudley thinks that would be seeing the world. So Eric came this morning early and I slipped down and met him before any one was up. And we came here. I told Eric,” Lisa confessed, “what you told me about Cornelia Emmeline Ayres’ elopement. And we knew you would both understand.”
Pelleas and I looked at each other swiftly. Nature is very just.
“But what are you crying for, dear?” I puzzled then; “you are never sorry you came?”
“Ah, but,” said Lisa sadly, “I think that Miss Wortley really wants to go to Europe and wait about for things to bloom. And now of course she can’t. And then they say—Uncle Dudley says—that I can’t make Eric happy until I know something of life.”
“My dear,” said I from the superiority of my seventy years, “I don’t know about the rest. But that much I am positive is nonsense.”
“Isn’t loving somebody knowing all about life?” Lisa asked simply.
“It is,” Pelleas and I answered together.
“Ah,” Lisa cried, brightening, “I said you would understand. Didn’t I, Eric?”