"
"It's because I've been concealing my goodness too much. Stay here with me
tonight and don't go back to brood in that dismal, forsaken house. We'll see
how Jack is in the morning, and if he's all right, take him along with you,
so's to be all there together if Susanna comes back this week, as I kind of
hope she will. Make Ellen have the house all nice and cheerful from top to
bottom, with a good supper ready to put on the table the night she comes.
You'd better pick your asters and take 'em in for the parlor, then I'll cut
the chrysanthemums for you in the middle of the week. The day she comes I'll
happen in, and stay to dinner if you find it's going to be mortifying for you;
but if everything is as I expect it will be, and the way Susanna always did
have things, I'll make for home and leave you to yourselves. Susanna ain't one
to nag and hector and triumph over a man when he's repented."
John hugged Louisa, pepper-and-salt shawl, black rigolctte, and all, when she
finished this unprecedented speech; and when he went to sleep that night in
the old north chamber, the one he and Louisa had been born in, the one his
father and mother had died in, it was with a little smile of hope on his lips.
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