“Well, not tonight,” she said; “and if that’s what you’re sitting up for—”
Irene caught her round the neck again, and ran out of the room.
The Colonel was packed off on the eight o’clock boat the next morning; but his recovery did not prevent Corey from repeating his visit in a week. This time Irene came radiantly up to Penelope’s room, where she had again withdrawn herself. “You must come down, Pen,” she said. “He’s asked if you’re not well, and mamma says you’ve got to come.”
After that Penelope helped Irene through with her calls, and talked them over with her far into the night after Corey was gone. But when the impatient curiosity of her mother pressed her for some opinion of the affair, she said, “You know as much as I do, mother.”
“Don’t he ever say anything to you about her—praise her up, any?”
“He’s never mentioned Irene to me.”
“He hasn’t to me, either,” said Mrs. Lapham, with a sigh of trouble. “Then what makes him keep coming?”
“I can’t tell you. One thing, he says there isn’t a house open in Boston where he’s acquainted. Wait till some of his friends get back, and then if he keeps coming, it’ll be time to inquire.”
“Well!” said the mother; but as the weeks passed she was less and less able to attribute Corey’s visits to his loneliness in town, and turned to her husband for comfort.
“Silas, I don’t know as we ought to let young Corey keep coming so. I don’t quite like it, with all his family away.”
“He’s of age,” said the Colonel. “He can go where he pleases. It don’t matter whether his family’s here or not.”
“Yes, but if they don’t want he should come? Should you feel just right about letting him?”
“How’re you going to stop him? I swear, Persis, I don’t know what’s got over you! What is it? You didn’t use to be so. But to hear you talk, you’d think those Coreys were too good for this world, and we wa’n’t fit for ’em to walk on.”
“I’m not going to have ’em say we took an advantage of their being away and tolled him on.”
“I should like to hear ’em say it!” cried Lapham. “Or anybody!”
“Well,” said his wife, relinquishing this point of anxiety, “I can’t make out whether he cares anything for her or not. And Pen can’t tell either; or else she won’t.”
“Oh, I guess he cares for her, fast enough,” said the Colonel.
“I can’t make out that he’s said or done the first thing to show it.”
“Well, I was better than a year getting my courage up.”
“Oh, that was different,” said Mrs. Lapham, in contemptuous dismissal of the comparison, and yet with a certain fondness. “I guess, if he cared for her, a fellow in his position wouldn’t be long getting up his courage to speak to Irene.”
Lapham brought his fist down on the table between them.
“Look here, Persis! Once for all, now, don’t you ever let me hear you say anything like that again! I’m worth nigh on to a million, and I’ve made it every cent myself; and my girls are the equals of anybody, I don’t care who it is. He ain’t the fellow to take on any airs; but if he ever tries it with me, I’ll send him to the right about mighty quick. I’ll have a talk with him, if—”
“No, no; don’t do that!” implored his wife. “I didn’t mean anything. I don’t know as I meant anything. He’s just as unassuming as he can be, and I think Irene’s a match for anybody. You just let things go on. It’ll be all right. You never can tell how it is with young people. Perhaps she’s offish. Now you ain’t—you ain’t going to say anything?”
Lapham suffered himself to be persuaded, the more easily, no doubt, because after his explosion he must have perceived that his pride itself stood in the way of what his pride had threatened. He contented himself with his wife’s promise that she would never again present that offensive view of the case, and she did not remain without a certain support in his sturdy self-assertion.
XII
Mrs. Corey returned with her daughters in the early days of October, having passed three or four weeks at Intervale after leaving Bar Harbour. They were somewhat browner than they were when they left town in June, but they were not otherwise changed. Lily, the elder of the girls, had brought back a number of studies of kelp and toadstools, with accessory rocks and rotten logs, which she would never finish up and never show anyone, knowing the slightness of their merit. Nanny, the younger, had read a great many novels with a keen sense of their inaccuracy as representations of life, and had seen a great deal of life with a sad regret for its difference from fiction. They were both nice girls, accomplished, well-dressed of course, and well enough looking; but they had met no one at the seaside or the mountains whom their taste would allow to influence their fate, and they had come home to the occupations they had left, with no hopes and no fears to distract them.
In the absence of these they were fitted to take the more vivid interest in their brother’s affairs, which they could see weighed upon their mother’s mind after the first hours of greeting.
“Oh, it seems to have been going on, and your father has never written a word about it,” she said, shaking her head.
“What good would it have done?” asked Nanny, who was little and fair, with rings of light hair that filled a bonnet-front very prettily; she looked best in a bonnet. “It would only have worried you. He could not have stopped Tom; you couldn’t, when you came home to do it.”
“I dare say papa didn’t know much about
