"Sulking in her room, I suppose," he thought.
He had come at some inconvenience, to spend Sunday and talk over this
project of the child, "for I'd like to see her happier," he told
himself; and now, instead of sitting down, sensibly, to discuss
things, she flared out over this invitation to supper. Her intensity
fatigued him. "I must be getting old," he ruminated, "and Helena will
always be the age she was ten years ago. Ten? It's thirteen! How time
flies; she was twenty. How interested I was in Frederick's health in
those days!"
He stretched himself out on the bench under the poplar, and lit
another cigar. "If _I'm_ willing to go, why is she so exercised?
Women are all alike--except Alice." He smiled as he thought of his
girl, and instantly the hardness in his face lifted, as a cloud shadow
lifts and leaves sunshine behind it. Then some obscure sense of
fitness made him pull himself together, and put his mind on affairs
that had nothing in common with Helena; affairs in which he could
include his girl without offending his taste.
After a while he got up and wandered about between the borders, where
the clean, bitter scent of daffodils mingled with the box. Once he
stood still, looking down over the orchard on the hill-side below him,
at the bright sheen of the river edged with leafless maples; on its
farther side were the meadows, and then the hills, smoky in their warm
haze.
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