..
Helena did not ask any more questions. David, lounging against her
knee, chattered on, ending with a candid and uncomplimentary reference
to Mr. Pryor; but she did not reprove him. When, having, as it were,
displayed his sling and his bag of pebbles, he was ready to run
joyously back to the other home, she kissed him silently and with a
strange new consciousness of the everlasting difference between them.
But that did not lessen her passionate determination that William King
should never steal him from her! Yet how could she defeat her enemy?
A week passed, and still undecided, she wrote to Dr. Lavendar asking
further hospitality for David: "I want to have him with me always, but
just now I am a little uncertain whether I can do so, because I am
going to leave Old Chester. I will come and ask you about it in a few
days."
She took the note out to the stable to George and bade him carry it to
the Rectory; as she went back to the empty house, she had a glimpse of
Mr. and Mrs. Smith's jewel-like eyes gleaming redly upon her from the
gloom of the rabbit-hutch, and a desolate longing for David made her
hurry indoors. But there the silence, unbroken by the child's voice,
was unendurable; it seemed to turn the confusion of her thoughts into
actual noise. So she went out again to pace up and down the little
brick paths between the box borders of the garden. The morning was
still and warm; the frost of a sharp night had melted into threads of
mist that beaded the edges of blackened leaves and glittered on the
brown stems of withered annuals.
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