“Ha! How did you enjoy yourself?”
He began a long history of three days in the metropolis. I listened, and heard little. I heard more plainly the cry of some night birds over Nethermere, and the peevish, wailing, yarling cry of some beast in the wood. I was thankful to slam the door behind me, to stand in the light of the hall.
“Leslie!” exclaimed Mother, “I am glad to see you.”
“Thank you,” he said, turning to Lettie, who sat with her lap full of work, her head busily bent.
“You see I can’t get up,” she said, giving him her hand, adorned as it was by the thimble. “How nice of you to come! We did not know you were back.”
“But . . .!” he exclaimed, then he stopped.
“I suppose you enjoyed yourself,” she went on calmly. “Immensely, thanks.”
Snap, snap, snap went her needle through the new stuff. Then, without looking up, she said:
“Yes, no doubt. You have the air of a man who has been enjoying himself.”
“How do you mean?”
“A kind of guilty — or shall I say embarrassed — look. Don’t you notice it, Mother?”
“I do!” said my mother.
“I suppose it means we may not ask him questions,” Lettie concluded, always very busily sewing.
He laughed. She had broken her cotton, and was trying to thread the needle again.
“What have you been doing this miserable weather?” he enquired awkwardly.
“Oh, we have sat at home desolate. ‘Ever of thee I’m fo-o-ondly dreaming’— and so on. Haven’t we, Mother?”
“Well,” said Mother, “I don’t know. We imagined him all sorts of lions up there.”
“What a shame we may not ask him to roar his old roars over for us,” said Lettie.
“What are they like?” he asked.
“How should I know? Like a sucking dove, to judge from your present voice. ‘A monstrous little voice.’”
He laughed uncomfortably.
She went on sewing, suddenly beginning to sing to herself:
“Pussy cat, Pussy cat, where have you been? I’ve been up to London to see the fine queen: Pussy cat, Pussy cat, what did you there — I frightened a little mouse under a stair.”
“I suppose,” she added, “that may be so. Poor mouse! — but I guess she’s none the worse. You did not see the queen, though?”
“She was not in London,” he replied sarcastically.
“You don’t —” she said, taking two pins from between her teeth. “I suppose you don’t mean by that, she was in Eberwich — your queen?”
“I don’t know where she was,” he answered angrily.
“Oh!” she said, very sweetly, “I thought perhaps you had met her in Eberwich. When did you come back?”
“Last night,” he replied.
“Oh — why didn’t you come and see us before?”
“I’ve been at the offices all day.”
“I’ve been up to Eberwich,” she said innocently.
“Have you?”
“Yes. And I feel so cross because of it. I thought I might see you. I felt as if you were at home.”
She stitched a little, and glanced up secretly to watch his face redden, then she continued innocently, “Yes — I felt you had come back. It is funny how one has a feeling occasionally that someone is near; when it is someone one has a sympathy with.” She continued to stitch, then she took a pin from her bosom, and fixed her work, all without the least suspicion of guile.
“I thought I might meet you when I was out —” another pause, another fixing, a pin to be taken from her lips —“but I didn’t.”
“I was at the office till rather late,” he said quickly. She stitched away calmly, provokingly.
She took the pin from her mouth again, fixed down a fold of stuff, and said softly:
“You little liar.”
Mother had gone out of the room for her recipe book.
He sat on his chair dumb with mortification. She stitched swiftly and unerringly. There was silence for some moments. Then he spoke:
“I did not know you wanted me for the pleasure of plucking this crow,” he said.
“I wanted you!” she exclaimed, looking up for the first time. “Who said I wanted you?”
“No one. If you didn’t want me I may as well go.”
The sound of stitching alone broke the silence for some moments, then she said deliberately:
“What made you think I wanted you?”
“I don’t care a damn whether you wanted me or whether you didn’t.”
“It seems to upset you! And don’t use bad language. It is the privilege of those near and dear to one.”
“That’s why you begin it, I suppose.”
“I cannot remember —” she said loftily.
He laughed sarcastically.
“Well — if you’re so beastly cut up about it —” He put this tentatively, expecting the soft answer. But she refused to speak, and went on stitching. He fidgeted about, twisted his cap uncomfortably, and sighed. At last he said:
“Well — you — have we done then?”
She had the vast superiority, in that she was engaged in ostentatious work. She could fix the cloth, regard it quizzically, rearrange it, settle down and begin to sew before she replied. This humbled him. At last she said:
“I thought so this afternoon.”
“But, good God, Lettie, can’t you drop it?”
“And then?”— the question startled him.
“Why! — forget it,” he replied.
“Well?”— she spoke softly, gently. He answered to the call like an eager hound. He crossed quickly to her side as she sat sewing, and said, in a low voice:
“You do care something for me, don’t you, Lettie?”
“Well”— it was modulated kindly, a sort of promise of assent.
“You have treated me rottenly, you know, haven’t you? You know I— well, I care a good bit.”
“It is a queer way of showing it.” Her voice was now a gentle reproof, the sweetest of surrenders and forgiveness. He leaned forward, took her face in his hands, and kissed her, murmuring:
“You are a little tease.”
She laid her sewing in her lap, and looked up.
The next day, Sunday, broke wet and dreary. Breakfast was late, and about ten o’clock we stood at the window looking upon the impossibility of our going to church.
There was a driving drizzle of rain, like a dirty curtain before the landscape. The nasturtium leaves by the garden walk had gone rotten in a frost, and the gay green discs had given place to the first black flags of winter, hung on flaccid stalks, pinched at the neck. The grass plot was strewn with fallen leaves, wet and brilliant: scarlet splashes of Virginia creeper, golden drift from the limes, ruddy brown shawls under the beeches, and away back in the corner, the black mat of maple