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Mellony turned her eyes from emptiness, and fixed them upon her mother's face, dimly outlined in the vagueness. "Is that all you've been," she asked, "just somebody's daughter?" It was as if a heavy weight fell from her lips and settled upon her mother's heart. There was a silence. Mellony's eyes, though she could not see them, seemed to Mrs.
Pember moved about the room, slightly altering its arrangements, now and then looking at her daughter half furtively, as if waiting for her to speak; but Mellony's head was not turned from the open window, and she was utterly silent.
The structure reared with tears and prayers, the structure of Mellony's happiness, seemed to crumble before her eyes. "And I was to give you this;" and from the lining of his hat the captain drew forth a folded paper. "Then you knew about it?" said Mrs. Pember, in a flash of cold wrath. "No, no, I didn't. My daughter's boy brought this to me, and I was to tell you they was married.
That she failed to distinguish between individuals, that she failed to see that young Baldwin was destitute of those traits which her sharpened vision would now have detected in Pember's youth, was both the fault of her perceptive qualities and the fruit of her impregnable resolve. She had been hurt by Mellony's rebellion, but not influenced by so much as a hair's-breadth.
Mis' Pember, you see Mellony Mellony's married." "Mellony married!" Strangely enough she had not thought of that. She grasped the doorpost for support. "Yes, she up and married him," went on the captain more blithely. "I hardly thought it of Mellony," he added in not unpleasurable reflection, "nor yet of Ira." "Nor I either." Mrs. Pember's lips moved with difficulty. Mellony married!
"No," he exclaimed, "I ain't coming! I don't want to go along back with your mother and you, as if we weren't old enough to be out by ourselves. I might as well be handcuffed, and so might you! If you'll come round with me the way we came, and let her go the way she came, I'll go with you fast enough." Mellony's eyes grew wet again, as she looked from him to her mother, and again at him. Mrs.
Mellony was later than usual, her mother did not hear her moving about, even; but she was unwilling to disturb her; she would wait a while longer before calling her. At last, however, the conviction of the immorality of late rising could no longer be ignored, and she turned the knob of Mellony's door and stepped into the room.
"Happier!" he paused in scorn "and she badgerin' you all the time if you take a walk with me, and watchin' us as if we were thieves! You ain't happy now, are you?" "No." Mellony's eyes filled, and a sigh caught and became almost a sob. "Well, I wish she'd give me a try at makin' you happy, that's all." His would-be sulkiness softened into a tender sense of injury.
He spoke to the mother, but he looked, not without sympathy at the daughter. "Yes, I found 'em." "You reckoned on fetchin' only one of 'em home, I take it," said Captain Smart. "I ain't responsible but for one of 'em," replied Mrs. Pember with some grimness, but with her eyes averted from Mellony's crimsoning face. "Come, ma," said Mellony again, and they passed on.
Pember had paused, also, and stood a little in advance of them. Her stolidity showed no anxiety; she was too sure of the result. "No," Mellony's lips framed the words with an accustomed but grievous patience, "I can't to-night, Ira; I must go with ma." "It's to-night that'll be the last chance there'll be, maybe," he muttered, as he flung himself off in the other direction.
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