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It was now five o'clock, and the fog had so far lightened that we could see each other and a stretch of open water. At intervals the fog-horns of vessels passing us, but hidden from us, tormented Aldrich to a state of extreme exasperation. He hailed them with frantic shrieks and shouts, and Stumps and the Lady Moya shouted with him.
When these camping-trips were proposed to Moya, she hesitated and responded languidly; but when Paul suggested leaving her even for a day, her fears fluttered across his path and wiled him another way. Vaguely he felt that she was unlike herself less buoyant, though often restless; and sometimes he fancied she was pale underneath her sun-burned color like that of rose-hips in October.
The eyes she sought to question hardened under her gaze. Here, too, was a veil. Mrs. Bogardus sat with her hands clasped in her lap. She was motionless, but the creaking of her silks could be heard as her bosom rose and fell. After a moment she said: "Paul's tray is on the table in the dining-room. Will you take it when you go up?" Moya altered her own manner instantly. "But you?" she hesitated.
Moya sighed, and sank into prose again. "There is a gaudy yellow moss in these woods that flecks the straight and mournful tree-trunks like a wandering glint of sunlight; and there is a crepe-like black moss that hangs funeral scarfs upon the boughs, as if there had been a death in the forest, and the trees were in line for the burial procession.
Directly behind me, not fifty feet from us, was a shelving beach and a stone wharf, and above it a vine-covered cottage, from the chimney of which smoke curled cheerily. Had the yawl, while Lady Moya was taking the oars, not swung in a circle, and had the sun not risen, in three minutes more we would have bumped ourselves into the State of Connecticut.
For some time he had been crouching in the bow, whispering indignantly to Lady Moya; now he exclaimed aloud: "What did I tell you?" he cried contemptuously; "they got away in this boat because they were afraid of me, not because they were afraid of being drowned. If they've nothing to be afraid of, why are they so anxious to keep us drifting around all night in this fog?
I wouldn't have missed the knowledge of our beginnings for the world. What a prosperous fool and ass I might have made of myself!" "Morbid again," said Moya. "You belong to your own day and generation. You might as well wear country shoes and clothes because your father wore them."
It was late autumn before all these arrangements could be made. Paul and Moya, leaving the young scion aged nineteen months in the care of his nurse and his grandmother, went down the river to open the New York house.
This was lucky, for the grass was too wet for the children to play on it, and when mothers and children were crowded on the veranda idle words sometimes changed to cross ones. "Tis strange; they's good women, iv'ry wan, take 'em alone," Moya had said one day to Mrs.
"What absurdity!" cried Moya. Then glancing at him she added quickly, "My father is a hired man. Most fathers who are worth anything are!" "My father was because he came of that class. His father was one before him. His mother took in tailoring in the village where he was born. He had only the commonest common-school education and not much of that.
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