was quite as compliant when he woke, but he found his wife of another mind, after a night passed beyond the influence of her niece. She came into his room before he was up, or fairly awake, fully dressed and with a defensive armor invisibly on, which she betrayed in saying, " Well, she is a case."
"Why, what has she been doing now?"
Crombie asked, instantly roused to consciousness.
" Oh, nothing. I have just been thinking her over, and I have gone back to my first impressions. I think what she has done is enough without anything more. The question is, what ought we to do? Shall we quietly ignore Mr. Craybourne until she chooses to make a move, or shall we ignore her, and you go over to the Saco Shore and call upon him, and take the bull by the horns? Do you know, my dear, I believe that's just what she wants you to do. How can we tell but it's a plot between them to force our hands? There's every probability, to my mind, that she planned for him to get here before her, so that he would come and be looked over before she arrived, and we be driven at the point of the bayonet to say what we think of him. I'll bet anything you dare that she was enraged beyond description when she found that she had missed fire, and that we hadn't seen him, after all!"
" I don't think it's fair," Crombie said, " to use such various and vigorous imagery with a man that's still on his back."
"Well, you must get up, then." She had been going about, pulling up window-shades and throwing open shutters, as she talked, and she now confronted him in the full light of day. "It's nearly breakfast-time, anyway; and I want to talk it thoroughly over with you after you're shaved."
" I shall be clearer, then; but I shall be a great deal hungrier, and I don't believe I can talk it over till I've had my coffee."
"You've got to," she said, going out of the room.
But before he had half-finished shaving, and while he was still grieving inwardly at having to help his wife make up her mind about her niece all over again, he heard her voice gayly lifted and the clash of enthusiastic kisses in a pause of the rustling skirts that he knew to be meeting in the upper hallway on which all the bedroom doors opened. He noticed that his wife's and her niece's voices were very much alike in the one asking, "Why, child, you poor thing, are you up already? Why didn't you let me send your breakfast to your room?" and the other answering, " Oh, I'm always up to breakfast, aunt, and I'm so be-you-tifull rested, I couldn't think of it."
" Well, then, come right down. It 'll be on the table instantly," he heard his wife continue. "Your uncle will come any old time, as he says, and we needn't wait for him."
"Well, I am rather nippish," he heard Lillias owning in the same note.
The girl was very amusing, he thought, when he found them at breakfast, and Mrs. Crombie said she had been telling about her university life, out there, and bade her go on.
" Oh, I don't believe Uncle Archibald will care for it," Lillias said, but she corrected herself so far as to add, " It is rather funny, I suppose, to you, off here." He liked her standing up so for her adoptive West, and he showed an immediate interest which inspired her. She was looking still prettier than the night before, and the flower-like freshness of her morning-dress was quite as becoming as the twilight tones which had clothed her as with a pensive music the night before. He tried to put out of his mind a saying to the effect that in the dark all cats are gray, while he found a singular pleasure in the pseudo-deference with which she addressed herself to him. "You see," she continued, "that my lectures are rather outside of the regular courses, and that was the reason why the general public was always more or less at them. I believe they were popular, but I knew all the time that they would have been more popular if they had been more — well, humbuggy. And you know I couldn't stand that, uncle," she appealed to him with a sidelong glance.
" No," he assented, in a way that made her laugh.
She went on: "People like that, both old and young, and I should have had all the unoccupied human material that goes into women's clubs raving about me, if I had done some sort of Delsarte business; they would have much preferred a song and dance to the modesty of nature which I was trying to brag up by precept and practice. I was tolerably adored by my classes, as it was, but I should have had them in ecstasies if I had descended to the cheap kind of things we were taught to avoid in the dramatic school."
"Yes," Crombie said, and now Lillias did not immediately continue.
When she did, it was to say, with a silently accumulated frankness, "The only one, really, that thoroughly understood, from the first instant, what I was driving at, was Mr. Craybourne. I suppose," she said, with another cast of her eyes, though this time it was rather defiant than appealing, towards Crombie, "Aunt Hester has told you about him?"
" Not at all! What about him?"
His effrontery made her laugh again.
" Oh, that's another story, as Kipling says — or used to say; I believe he doesn't say it now, anymore. This story only relates to his telling me, as soon as he could manage to get introduced — which he did by very properly waiting and asking the president to perform the ceremony, when he could have got any soul in the place to do it at once — that I was the first person to give him the least notion of what nature was at."
"Indeed!" Crombie said. "Did you believe him?"
" Not immediately. There's nothing," she deferred, " that we suspect so much as downright openness, is there?"
" It's often very misleading."
"Well, I found out afterwards that he really meant it. That," she added, after a distinct interval, " was what gave me pause," and Crombie felt that she had come to the other story. " There is no use beating about the bush, and I'm not going to. Aunt Hester," she now turned to Mrs. Crombie, "I may as well say first as last that if the Mellays hadn't providentially written to put me off a week I should have invented some providential excuse for coming to you and letting me meet Mr. Craybourne as nearly on the parental premises as I could get them."
Crombie stole a look at his wife, but he could detect nothing of resentment in her face; nothing but a generous and protecting welcome. She laid her left hand along the table towards the girl, and Lillias put hers gratefully into it. "You have done exactly right, my dear," she said, and Lillias went on, piecing a little break in her voice:
" Even if mother were on the ground, and not off in the wilds of Europe somewhere, I should wish Uncle Archie's approval, as I've no father of my own; for in the kind of scrambling life I've led I like to have a thing of this kind perfectly regular. I'm not the least bit bohemian, Aunt Hester, though I know you always thought me so — "
"No, my dear!" Mrs. Crombie protested, but Lillias tenderly insisted:
"Oh yes, you did, aunt, and I don't blame you; I should have, myself. But at heart I'm deadly respectable, and Mr. Craybourne's being an Englishman makes me all the more anxious to be more so; though he thinks the other kind of thing is charming, and was quite ready to be fetched by it — at least in my case. You see, I'm not having any concealments from you!"
"You needn't have, poor child!" Mrs. Crombie said, so tenderly that Crombie kept himself with difficulty from a derisory snort.
"And now you have the whole thing before you. I have come to you simply for a social basis, a domestic hearth, a family fireside, and when Mr. Craybourne comes, I want him to find me in a chimney-comer belonging to my own kith and kin."
The terms of this declaration, and the mixed tones in which
