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Why, if this were true, what a hypocrite the girl was! As coarse and unfeeling as the rest of them. Yet she had some shame left; she had blushed to be caught in the act by him. It showed her worse than those who justified this thing, the enormity of which she had seemed to understand well. "You mustn't blame her too much," came Lydia Sessions's smooth voice.
I sat holding his horse and feeling my satisfaction rise like the mercury in a warmed thermometer. Contrasting this mood with the cold malignancy and resolve of his temper in the soldiers' room at Sessions's, I saw, to my delight, that our secret was forever imprisoned in his breast, gagged and chained down by the iron of his own inextricable infamy.
The missive ended all too soon, with the statement that I was requested to call, on my way out of camp, at the side gallery of the house Sessions's and let the writer and her sister and her cousin and her father and her aunt see me in my new uniform and bid me good-bye. I found but one white figure under the dim veranda eaves. "Miss Camille?" "Wh' who is that?" responded a musical voice.
She was thirty and penniless. She belonged to a circle where everybody had money. Her sister had married well, and Harriet was no better-looking than she. All Lydia Sessions's considerable forces were by heredity and training turned into one narrow channel the effort to make a creditable, if not a brilliant, match. And she had thought she was succeeding.
For a moment Johnnie stood, thwarted and non-plussed. The insults directed toward herself made almost no impression on her, strangely as they came from Lydia Sessions's lips. She was too intent on her own purpose to care greatly. "Shade Buckheath " she began cautiously, intending only to state that Shade had taken Stoddard's car; but Lydia Sessions drew back with a scream.
There rose a titter about the two. It spread and swelled till the whole assembly was in a gale of laughter. Miss Sessions's becoming blush deepened to the tint of angry mortification.
The nurse on the front seat held the youngest child, a little girl about Deanie's age. As they came nearer, the driver drew up, evidently in obedience to Miss Sessions's command, and she leaned forward graciously to speak to Johnnie. "Good morning, John," said Miss Sessions as the carriage stopped. "Whose children are those?"
Getting no answer at the side door, she pushed it open and ventured through silent room after room until she came to the stairway, and so on up to Miss Sessions's bedroom door. She had been there before, and fearing to alarm by knocking, she finally called out in what she tried to make a normal, reassuring tone. "It's only me Johnnie Consadine Miss Lydia." The answer was a hasty, muffled outcry.
"I fancy Johnnie finds out what you admire most, and makes favourites of your favourites." Stoddard looked a bit blank for an instant. Then, "Well perhaps she does," he allowed, hesitatingly. His usual tolerant smile held a hint of indulgent tenderness, and there was a vibration in his voice which struck to Lydia Sessions's heart like a knife.
It's in the prayer about 'daily bread, and 'the kingdom and the power and the glory. Don't you think those are beautiful words, Miss Lydia the 'power and the glory'?" Miss Sessions's lips sucked in with that singular, half-reluctant expression of condemnation which was becoming fairly familiar to Johnnie. "Oh, John!" she said reprovingly, 'Daily bread' is all we have anything to do with.
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