The Iron Woman by Deland, Margaret Wade Campbell, 1857-1945

He thought to himself that he could not go back and tell Elizabeth what her uncle had said; he could not repeat the insult! Some time, when he was calmer, he would tell her quietly that he had been wronged, that she herself had wronged him. But just now he could not talk to her; he was too angry and too miserable.

So, walking slowly in the foggy dusk that was pungent with the smoke of bonfires on the flats, he suddenly wheeled about and went in the other direction. "I'll go and have supper with Nannie," he thought; "I'm afraid she is dreadfully worried and unhappy,--and all on my account, dear old Nancy!"

CHAPTER XXXIII

"Do you think," Robert Ferguson wrote Mrs. Richie about the middle of September--"do you think you could come to Mercer for a little while and look after Nannie? The poor child is so unhappy and so incapable of making up her mind about herself that I am uneasy about her."

"Of course I will go," Mrs. Richie told her son.

David had come down to the little house on the seashore to spend Sunday with her, and in the late afternoon they were sitting out on the sand in a sunny, sheltered spot watching the slow, smooth heave of the quiet sea. David's shoulder was against her knee, his pipe had gone out, and he was looking with lazy eyes at the slipping sparkle of sunshine on the scarcely perceptible waves; sometimes he lifted his marine glasses to follow a sail gleaming like a white wing against the opalescent east.

"I wonder why Nannie is unhappy," he ruminated; "she was never, poor little Nannie! capable of appreciating Mrs. Maitland; so I don't suppose she loved her?"

"She loved her as much as she could," Mrs. Richie said; "and that is all any of us can do, David. But she misses her. If a mountain went out of your landscape, wouldn't you feel rather blank? Well, Nannie's mountain has gone. Yes; I'll go and stay with her, poor child, for a while, and perhaps bring her back for a fortnight with us--if you wouldn't mind?"

"Of course I wouldn't mind. Bring her along."

"I wonder if you could close this house for me?" she said; "I don't like to shut it up now and leave you without a roof over your head in case you had a chance to take a day off."

"Of course I can close it," he said; and added that if he couldn't shut up a bandbox of a summer cottage he would be a pretty useless member of society. "I'll come down the first chance I get in the next fortnight. . . . Mother, I suppose you will see--_her?_"

Mrs. Richie gave him a startled look. "I suppose I shall."

He was silent for several minutes. She did not dare to help him by a word. Then, as if he had wrenched the question up by the roots, torn it out of his sealed heart, he said, "Do you suppose she cares for him?"

It was the first time in these later speechless months that he had turned to her. Steadying herself on that advice of Robert Ferguson's: 'when he does blurt it out don't get excited,' she answered, calmly enough, "I don't know."