A sigh passed her lips, and, as if in answer to the sound, there came the rumble of approaching wheels in the turnpike. As she climbed the low rail fence which divided the corn-lands from the highway, she met the old family carriage from Jordan's Journey returning with the two ladies on the rear seat. The younger, a still pretty woman of fifty years, with shining violet eyes that seemed always apologizing for their owner's physical weakness, leaned out and asked the girl, in a tone of gentle patronage, if she would ride with the driver?
"Thank you, Mrs. Gay, it's only a quarter of a mile and I don't mind the walk."
"We've brought an overcoat—Kesiah and I—a good thick one, for your grandfather. It worried us last winter that he went so lightly clad during the snow storms."
Molly's face changed, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure.
"Oh, thank you, thank you!" she exclaimed, losing her manner of distant politeness. "I've been trying to persuade him to buy one, but he hates to spend money on himself."
Kesiah, who had leaned back during the conversation, with the scowling look she wore when her heart was moved, nodded grimly while she felt in the black travelling bag she carried for Mrs. Gay's salts. She was one of those unfortunate women of a past generation, who, in offering no allurement to the masculine eye, appeared to defeat the single end for which woman was formed. As her very right to existence lay in her possible power to attract, the denial of that power by nature, or the frustration of it by circumstances, had deprived her, almost from the cradle, of her only authoritative reason for being. Her small, short-sighted eyes, below a false front which revealed rather than obscured her bare temples, flitted from object to object as though in the vain pursuit of some outside justification of her indelicacy in having permitted herself to be born.
"Samson tells me that my son has come, Molly," said Mrs. Gay, in a flutter of emotion. "Have you had a glimpse of him yet?"
The girl nodded. "He took supper at our house the night he got here."
"It was such a surprise. Was he looking well?"
"Very well, I thought, but it was the first time I had seen him, you know."
"Ah, I forgot. Are you sure you won't get in, child? Well, drive on,
Samson, and be very careful of that bird cage."
Samson drove on at the command, and Molly, plodding obstinately after the carriage, was enveloped shortly in the cloud of dust that floated after the wheels.
CHAPTER VI
TREATS OF THE LADIES' SPHERE
As the carriage rolled up the drive, there was a flutter of servants between the white columns, and Abednego, the old butler, pushed aside the pink-turbaned maids and came down to assist his mistress to alight.
"Take the bird cage, Abednego, I've bought a new canary," said Mrs. Gay.
"Here, hold my satchel, Nancy, and give Patsey the wraps and umbrellas."
She spoke in a sweet, helpless voice, and this helplessness was expressed in every lovely line of her figure. The most casual observer would have discerned that she had surrendered all rights in order to grasp more effectively at all the privileges. She was clinging and small and delicate and her eyes, her features, her plaintive gestures, united in an irresistible appeal to emotions.
"Where is Jonathan?" she asked, "I hoped he would welcome me."
"So I do, dearest mother—so I do," replied the young man, running hurriedly down the steps and then slipping his arm about her. "You came a minute or two earlier than I expected you, or I should have met you in the drive."
Half supporting, half carrying her, he led the way into the house and placed her on a sofa in the long drawing-room.
"I am afraid the journey has been too much for you," he said tenderly.
"Shall I tell Abednego to bring you a glass of wine."
"Kesiah will mix me an egg and a spoonful of sherry, dear, she knows just how much is good for me."
Kesiah, still grasping her small black bag, went into the dining-room and returned, bearing a beaten egg, which she handed to her sister. In her walk there was the rigid austerity of a saint who has adopted saintliness not from inclination, but from the force of a necessity against which rebellion has been in vain. Her plain, prominent features wore, from habit, a look of sullen martyrdom that belied her natural kindness of heart; and even her false brown front was arranged in little hard, flat curls, as though an artificial ugliness were less reprehensible in her sight than an artificial beauty.
In the midst of the long room flooded with sunshine, the little lady reclined on her couch and sipped gently from the glass Kesiah had handed her. The tapestried furniture was all in soft rose, a little faded from age, and above the high white wainscoting on the plastered walls, this same delicate colour was reflected in the rich brocaded gowns in the family portraits. In the air there was the faint sweet scent of cedar logs that burned on the old andirons.
"So you came all the way home to see your poor useless mother," murmured Mrs. Gay, shielding her cheek from the firelight with a peacock hand-screen.
"I wanted to see for myself how you stand it down here—and, by Jove, it's worse even than I imagined! How the deuce have you managed to drag out twenty years in a wilderness like this among a tribe of barbarians?"
"It is a great comfort to me, dear, to think that I came here on your uncle's account and that I am only following his wishes in making the place my home. He loved the perfect quiet and restfulness of it."
"Quiet! With that population of roosters making the dawn hideous! I'd choose the quiet of Piccadilly before that of a barnyard."
"You aren't used to country noises yet, and I suppose at first they are trying."
"Do you drive? Do you walk? How do you amuse yourself?"
"One doesn't have amusement when one is a hopeless invalid; one has only medicines. No, the roads are too heavy for driving except for a month or two in the summer. I can't walk of course, because of my heart, and as there has been no man on the place for ten years, I do not feel that it is safe for Kesiah to go off the lawn by herself. Once she got into quite a dreadful state about her liver and lack of exercise—(poor dear mother used to say that the difference between the liver of a lady and that of another person, was that one required no exercise and the other did)—but Kesiah, who is the best creature in the world, is very eccentric in some ways, and she imagines that her health suffers when she is kept in the house for several years. Once she got into a temper and walked a mile or two on the road, but when she returned I was in such a state of nervousness that she promised me never to leave the lawn again unless a gentleman was with her."
"What an angel you must be to have suffered so much and complained so little!" he exclaimed with fervour, kissing her hand.
Her eyes, which reminded him of dying violets, drooped over him above the peacock feathers she waved gently before her.
"Poor Kesiah, it is hard on her, too," she observed, "and I sometimes think she is unjust enough to blame me in her heart."
"But she doesn't feel things as you do, one can tell that to look at her."
"She isn't so sensitive and silly, you dear boy, but my poor nerves are responsible for that, you must remember. If Kesiah had been a man she would have