to know, at least,” he said:
“Oh, everybody ought to know. But it is no more possible for her to be told than for anyone else. I should be glad if he could get so good a girl. She is a beautiful creature, too, as well as good. Well!”
He rose from his chair, but from hers she entreated almost unawares, “ Oh, don’t go! Or, I oughtn’t to say it!”
“No, Amelia, you oughtn’t. If you said something else, I need never go.” He looked at her sadly, and her head drooped. “You let me see an image of home, like this, and then you take it from me. Well! I must submit. Good-night.” He put out his hand to her, but she would not take it.
She lifted her eyes to his, “You haven’t asked me if I tried to speak to James. I didn’t!”
“ I knew that.”
‘‘Perhaps I should—perhaps I should have tried, this morning, when we were alone, if— But perhaps I couldn’t.”
‘‘If what?”
“ If he hadn’t fancied that you did something last night that showed dislike of Mr. Langbrith.”
“What was it I did?”
“Something in the way you received his suggestion of the memorial tablet.”
“Oh, he noticed that? Well, I couldn’t help it.”
“ I know you couldn’t. Do you think I blame you?”
“I believe we don’t blame each other, Amelia.”
“And you don’t feel hard towards me for not trying?”
“I didn’t expect you to try.”
“But why shouldn’t we go on like this—the way we have gone on for twenty years? Why shouldn’t you be just my friend as long as you live? We are not young, and we couldn’t expect what young people expect of marriage.”
“I expect a great deal more,” he said. “You are solitary, and so am I. I have never had a home, and you could give me one. I have never had companionship at the time when a man wants it most, and you could be my companion. I want someone to talk to and to be silent to, when I feel the need of either. You could be my daughter, my mother, my sister. Why do you make me say these things to you?”
“ Well, then, why not come and let me be it here?
Why not come and make this your home? I know James wouldn’t object. I believe he would like to have you live with us. He has always been used to you—” Anther shook his head.
“Yes, yes,” she persisted. “We could give you all the room you wanted in the house here, and you could have Mr. Langbrith’s office for your office, out there by the gate. I have thought how it could be done— ”
“ It couldn’t be done, Amelia. The talk it would make in a place like Saxmills!”
“There wouldn’t be any talk. You have been here so long, and you are so respected. You have always been our doctor, and you have been in and out here day and night. You are like one of the family. You could come now, when Mrs. Burwell is going to give up her house, and you will have to go somewhere else, anyhow. It hasn’t made talk your living there with her all these years, and why should your living here do it? Sit down now, and let me tell you—”
She had put her hand unconsciously on his arm and was nervously pinching the sleeve. He took her hand away and held it in his own. “ I never think of Mrs. Burwell, nor she of me; but we two would always be thinking of each other. It wouldn’t do, my dear, and you know it.”
She broke out piteously, “ I am so afraid of James!”
“Yes, I understand that, and I should be afraid of him, too, if I came here to live with you, unless I came as your husband. In that case, I shouldn’t be afraid of him.”
“Ah, you hate him! I can see it by the way you say that. What shall I do?”
“ Nothing, Amelia, except be reasonable. I don’t hate your son; how could I? Of course, your fear of him stands in our way, but I am not at all sure that he does. He might have done so, a few years ago, but there is less probability that he would now.”
“How do you mean?”
“ He is more rational. He is of a nature that matures late; he is like you, in that, Amelia. That friend of his, that young man, told me how slowly James has won upon the liking and understanding of his college mates. They did not like him at first, but now, in his last year, they are beginning to value him, to make allowances for what repelled them, to see how he has changed, and to have an affection for him.” In his gloss of Falk’s laconic terms, Anther did not feel that he was misinterpreting his statement of Langbrith’s Harvard standing; his mother eagerly accepted the version, and imagined it insufficient. “I say this,” the doctor went on, “merely to illustrate my meaning. He is now at the age when the mind acts with an insight unknown to it before, and besides—” Anther broke off, and then asked, after a moment: “What reason have you for thinking that he is seriously taken with Hope? How is it different with them from what it has always been?”
“ I don’t know. Perhaps it is his being away, and then coming back and finding her changed into a new person. Girls change so suddenly at her age. If he had stayed at home, they might have gone on being boy and girl together always. But as it is— Perhaps it is partly the way I have seen him look at her—-with a kind of surprise. And this morning, he spoke of her with so much— Oh, if it only could be, what a load it would take off my heart!”
“It would take the main obstacle out of our path, too,” Anther responded. “He would judge you somewhat more from himself.”
Mrs. Langbrith colored faintly, with a kind of shame, which he saw and resented.
“You think it isn’t the same thing!”
“No,” she owned. “How could I? It is as right for us, though it is different, as it is for them. But—”
She stopped, and even after he had said, “Well?” she did not go on immediately.
Then she shook her head, and added,“ It wouldn’t get over the great obstacle. There would still be —Mr. Langbrith.”
“Then,” said Anther, harshly, “we must remove that obstacle, that incubus, ourselves. That man’s memory mustn’t be allowed to be a lifelong nightmare to you. You suffered enough from him when he was alive. We must tell James about him.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Then you must let me.”
She slowly turned her head away. “It’s too late,” she sighed.
“No. Now is just the time. Before this, it would have been too soon. While he was a child, you could not have told him; I understand that; and you had to let him grow up in the superstition of such a father as he imagines. But now he is old enough and strong enough to have his fetish taken from him. You owe it to him to take it. Put me out of the question entirely. I will never speak to you again
