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Richie's slightest wish, and careful of old Cherry-pie's comfort, and generously thoughtful even of Harris Blair, absorbed in his own apprehensions, heard no pain in his mother's voice. "I know all about it," Mrs. Maitland went on. "I won't have you call yourselves engaged until you are out of college, of course. But I have no objection to your looking forward to being engaged, and married, too.
"Aw, hell! They ain't no rat in that hole. Yo're seem' a heap o' smoke where they ain't even a lighted match. I don't wanna do anything against either Richie's outfit nor the Bar S, nor old Dale, but I ain't satisfied " "You ain't! Good Gawdamighty! Ain't I been tellin' you? Ain't I been explaining of it all in words of one syllable?
Suppose she should get fond of him and want to keep him how would Lloyd feel about it? Would he think the child might take her thoughts from him? But at that she smiled; he could not be so foolish! "I'll write and ask him, anyhow. Of course, if he objects, I wouldn't dream of it. I wonder what he will think?" Mr. Lloyd Pryor thought very deeply after he read Mrs. Richie's letter.
She knew the way; she remembered the summer oh, so long ago! when she and Nannie had driven over that sandy road along the beach on their way to Mrs. Richie's house. It was so deep with mud now that sometimes she had to walk outside the wheel-ruts into the wiry beach-grass.
But presently the soldier grew restless, stared about him for a few moments, and finally decided to leave the ladies and children to Richie's escort, and walk to the summit of the mountain and back, as a means of working off some excess of energy and gaining an appetite for dinner.
Richie's flattering assumption that Blair and she looked at things in the same way, and David's apparent indifference to Elizabeth's emotions, made the childish love-affair wholesomely commonplace on both sides. By mid-September it was obvious that the prospect of college was attractive to Blair, and that the moment of parting would not be tragic to Elizabeth.
He stopped a moment, and looked fixedly in his master's face, which was inflamed with shame and anger, and then proceeded. "My lord, I did you justice in my thought, and myself too; for, thought I, he would have been as deep in that sort of profligacy as in others, if it hadna been Richie's four quarters." "What new nonsense have you got to plague me with?" said Lord Nigel.
Ferguson put his hat down on the table, not noticing that the roses spotted it with their wet petals, and stared at him. "Well, upon my word!" he said. "Do you think I need you to instruct me in my duty to my niece?" Then, with sudden, cruel insight, he added, "David Richie's mother has done that." As he spoke he bent over and kissed Elizabeth. Instantly, with a smothered cry, she clung to him.
"Could you pack up in three weeks, Materna?" he said; "I think I'd like to get you settled before I go to the hospital." Mrs. Richie's instant acceptance of the change of date made him more annoyed than ever. "He has worried her!" he thought angrily; "I wonder how long this thing has been going on?" But he said nothing to her.
Richie's hand, held it tightly in hers, and the old carriage began its slow tug along the road that wound in and out among the dunes.... The story of David and Elizabeth and Blair pauses here. Or perhaps one might say it begins here. A decision such as was reached in the little house by the sea is not only an end, it is also a beginning.
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