“She can hear your report another time—indeed she has heard a great deal of it already,” said old Mrs. Morgan. “You don’t lose any time, Emma. But, Hester, if you are afraid—”
“Oh, I shouldn’t go on any account,” cried Emma, “with a bad cold. But then I have such dreadful colds when I do have them. I am obliged to go to bed. I never get my nose red like Hester’s, nor lose my voice—but I get such a cough. I am so thankful I have not had one here. It gives everybody so much trouble when you get ill on a visit, and you lose all the good of the visit, and might just as well be at home. There is grandpapa calling. I should just let him call if it was me. Well, Hester, if you will go, I can’t help it. Come in again if you are not afraid of the evening air, and you shall hear all the rest; or if you’ll have me at tea time, perhaps that will be best. I’ll go to you—”
The old captain sighed as he went out. Emma was, as it were, left speaking, standing on the step of the door addressing Hester, as she followed her old friend out into the dusky afternoon of one of those black days that conclude the year. Very black days they were on this occasion, not so cold as December often is, without snow or any of the harsher signs of winter, but also without sun or any of the exhilarating sharpness of the frost. Everything was dry, but dark, the skies leaden, the very Common showing less green. The captain went on before with a woollen comforter wrapped in many folds about his throat, and woollen mittens on the hands which grasped his stick with so much energy. He struck it against the ground as if he had been striking someone as he hurried away.
“I think that girl will be the death of us,” he said: then repented of his sharp utterance. “I told you I thought you were a spiritual grandchild, Hester. What the child of our child whom we lost, who never had a child, would have been. And you have spoiled us for the other thing—the grandchild of common life.”
“It is a long time since we have been out together,” said Hester, as the old man put his other hand in its large mitten within her slender arm.
“And you have been in the meantime getting into some of the muddles,” he said. “It was kind of my old wife to hand you over to me, Hester. We all think our own experience the best. She would like to have had you to herself, to find out all about it, and give you the help of her old lights; but instead of that she was self-denying, and handed you over to me. And now let me hear what it is, and see if the old ship’s lantern will do you any good.”
“Am I in any muddles?” said Hester. “I don’t know—perhaps there is nothing to tell. It is so hard to divide one thing from another.”
“So it is; but when it is divided it is easier to manage,” said the old captain. He paused a little to give her time to speak: but as she did not do so he resumed on an indifferent subject, that the girl’s confidence might not be forced. “I am always glad when the old year is over. You will say I am an old fool for that, as my days are so few. But the first of January is a great deal gayer than the first of December, though they may be exactly like each other. When you can say there will be spring this year—”
“Captain Morgan,” said Hester, who had been taking advantage of the pause without paying any attention to what he said, “Catherine Vernon is angry because I wear my mother’s pearls. How should that be?”
“You must be mistaken, my dear,” said the old captain promptly. “She has her faults, but Catherine is never paltry, Hester. That cannot be.”
“Either you are very much mistaken about her, or I am much mistaken about her,” Hester said.
The old man looked at her with a smile on his face.
“I don’t say anything against that. And which of us is most likely to be
