"If I were you, Arethusa," remarked Miss Eliza drily, after awhile, looking up from her magazine to bend her sharp glance on the pair on the sofa, "I would not crush my aunt into jelly in order to show her your sorrow at being so thoughtless and unfeeling. And you will make her quite ill; very likely it will bring on one of her bad headaches, if you carry on much longer that way."
Miss Asenath's headaches were periods of much anxiety for all the family, with the great suffering they brought the gentle invalid. Arethusa drew away from the couch abruptly. She felt suddenly overwhelmed with her inability ever to do the right thing; a feeling which Miss Eliza was quite often successful in arousing in her niece.
Miss Asenath offered her own cobwebby handkerchief to dry Arethusa's reddened eyes. Then she asked Miss Eliza if she would not be good enough to read aloud to them for awhile. Miss Asenath had some of the makings of a diplomat.
None of the roomful of women would really listen, for Miss Letitia would be far too intent on counting stitches, and Miss Asenath would dream, and to Arethusa, Miss Eliza's choice of reading matter was anything but interesting; but Miss Eliza herself would be made beatific. She considered herself somewhat gifted as an elocutionist; during her course at the old Freeport Seminary, now so long ago, she had had the most lady-like of instruction. She prided herself on her ability to put "expression" into her reading. Thus would amiability be especially restored in her quarter, and poor, persecuted Arethusa might have a little while in which to attain some degree of calmness once more.
So Miss Asenath patted the place at her side invitingly. Arethusa cuddled up very close; Miss Eliza went back to the beginning of her article, having read a paragraph or two; and peace began to reign with the very first word of the reading aloud.
When Miss Eliza's voice, with all the proper inflections, had followed the various whys and wherefores of the death of Servetus to a triumphant conclusion, she was a different person. All the sharpness aroused by Arethusa's seeming scorn of Timothy had disappeared. She was even ready to say, when her niece stooped to kiss her good-night, that she was sorry if she had made her unhappy in her manner of discussing Timothy, and Timothy's matrimonial possibilities; and this was a very great concession for Miss Eliza.
"But you are making a great big mistake, Arethusa," she could not help adding, "every way, in not taking Timothy while you can."
Yet it was amiably said, and did not cause the slightest excitement.
Which goes but to prove more surely that Miss Asenath seemed to have missed her calling.
CHAPTER VII
"That was such a pretty girl that just went past us, Ross."
Elinor Worthington's smiling glance followed the girl far down the deck.
For the creature was so deliciously young, everything about her; her slenderness; the joyful way she swung when she walked; even the cut of her clothes spelled youth. And she was undeniably pretty, with eyes like bits of blue sky and quantities of silky, corn-colored hair. Her mouth was almost too large, but even that could not spoil the essential prettiness of her. She was laughing at her escort, with glowing upturned face, as they swept past Elinor and Ross in their quiet corner, and her laugh displayed an unusually straight row of the whitest teeth imaginable.
"Was she?" Ross seemed most indifferent. "I didn't notice her. I never look at other women when you're around, my dear."
Elinor laughed. "You goose!" But 'way deep down in her heart she couldn't help feeling a bit flattered.
It was just past tea-time on the big home-coming liner, and it might seem as if all of its voyagers were taking an afternoon stroll. There was only one more day—to-morrow—left of the voyage before Boston Harbor, and everyone was full of the repressed excitement and restlessness of getting home. The decks were alive with couples and single folk, passing and repassing in both directions; some very briskly in real constitutionals, and some much more leisurely as though merely for the occupation of movement.
But Ross felt very lazy. He had buried himself deep in his steamer-chair and refused to budge an inch when Elinor had suggested that they might join that strolling throng.
"I'm a married man now," he said, "and I don't have to worry about exercising to keep my figure. Besides, I had much rather sit here in the corner and hold your hand under the rug."
So Elinor had humored him about the sitting still, and arranged a fat pillow under his head the way he liked it best; but she had no intention of permitting that even so newly married a couple as themselves should be seen holding hands in broad daylight on a crowded deck. Whereat, Ross pretended to sulk; he tilted his cap far down over his eyes; thrust his hands deep into his coat pockets and sprawled full-length in his chair. Though instead of conveying to the passers-by any idea of displeasure, with anything or anybody, his attitude only succeeded in picturing lazy comfort.
Arethusa would hardly have known this Ross Worthington reclining so easefully in the steamer-chair as the original of her beloved photograph. She might have recognized the eyes, keen and bright in their glance as ever, and with the same debonair smiling; but the wavy dark hair was clipped as closely as the hair of any other male biped and had greyed a trifle just at the temples. He was less like a novelist's creation, and more like the men Arethusa had known in the flesh, in his appearance, certainly. For this older Ross Worthington had discarded Italian military capes and Byronic collars and flowing ties for more conventional attire. He was as commonplace and ordinary as to clothing, in every respect, as any other man on that huge steamship.
But Elinor Worthington would have attracted attention almost anywhere, and more than one of the pedestrians had given her a second glance of surreptitious admiration as they passed her. She was rather a wonderful looking person. Ross's raptures had not been altogether exaggeration. She had a world of soft white hair, pure white it was, worn simply coiled around a beautifully shaped head; its elderly color in strange and attractive contrast to the smooth youthfulness of her lovely skin. Her eyes were brown, a warm, dark brown, under long dark lashes and slightly arched dark eyebrows; and the tiny gleam of unmistakable fun that lurked in their quiet depths was again a contrast to the almost classical severity of finely cut features, straight nose, and delicately chiseled mouth, and cleanly rounded chin. And she was as graceful in her slender tallness as the girl she had admired—this woman of forty or more. It was small wonder that Ross had declared he loved to look at her.
Here in this corner with her husband, Elinor Worthington was all herself. She glowed like a rose, with none of the little stiffness in her manner she so often unfortunately showed to strangers and which only the discerning few correctly named as shyness. To the majority of people she was likely to seem cold, almost distant.
"What are you thinking about? You look so serious and far away," Ross remarked after an interval of silence.
He believed in the power of the spoken word. It was not given him to remain quiet for long. He might have managed it with the communion of a hand-clasp; but without, it was impossible.
Just then the pretty girl and her escort passed by them again. Elinor's brown eyes watched the pair this second time until they had turned the corner of the deck.
"That girl," she said, half wistfully, "she is so delicious and young. I can't help wishing she were mine. There is something too utterly adorable about a young girl."
"She seems merely silly to me," Ross replied. "I don't see anything particularly interesting or unusual about her that should make you want to own her, or any other callow young thing her age. However, if you say she is adorable, I suppose she is. … Merciful Heavens!!"
"Ross Worthington!"
"And I never thought of her, I'll swear, until this very moment!" he muttered.
"Thought of who?"
"The child."