If Lavinia had need of help, she gave no token. She was at the station
to meet them, and she was bursting with a secret. There had been no
mention of it in her letters, because one could not be sure about such
things--and telling them in advance was likely to spoil the charm. Then
she sealed her lips until they were well within the discreet walls of
Vine Cottage.
“Of course I may be mistaken; but unless I miss my guess, there’s going
to be a wedding before you go back to New York.”
“A wedding? Some one I have met?”
“There! I was sure you didn’t suspect. Though how you could have helped
it--the way Syd acted, when you were here the end of January--”
“Dear old Syd! I hope he has fallen in love wisely. It would go hard
with him if he should blunder.”
“I’m sure it will be all right. The difference in age doesn’t
matter--and you know he will make her a noble husband. If only she
doesn’t get some foolish notion of telling him all that wretched
affair. I tried to caution her, in a roundabout way; but you know how
stubborn Eileen is.”
“Eileen!” Judith dropped a handful of toilet articles on the dressing
table and sat down, weakly.
“Mercy, Judith!” The woman’s tone carried positive contempt for such
obtuseness. “He was with her every evening while you and Larimore were
here, the last time. Of course they were reading Latin together, or
working with the violin. But I knew what it would lead to. And it was
my making her come home, after she’d been at their house three evenings
a week, that did it. He missed her so dreadfully that he got over
thinking about her as a little girl. Goodness knows, she’s more mature
than Sylvia was at twenty--and Syd will always be a boy.”
“Has she told you?”
“No, but I wouldn’t look for her to do that. She’s been very nice to
me. Oh, Judith, I hope she will tell you it’s true.”
“I’m sure it would be a great comfort to you to have her happily
married.”
“Yes--but I wasn’t thinking so much about that part of it. I had my own
case in mind. It would be the last straw of evidence--that all my old
ideas were wrong. For the first time in my life, I want to be sure I
was in the wrong.”
Her eyes glittered and her slender form seemed to dilate. She was not
thinking of her cruelty to Eileen and her subsequent reluctance to
admit that in her daughter’s case good might grow out of evil. Eileen
was become, in her mother’s eyes, a manikin, to be posed this way and
that for the studying of effects--an architect’s drawing, to serve as a
pattern for the rebuilding of her mother’s life.