even Aunt Barbara or Betty could have cooked them—­so much she conceded to Mrs. Markham and Eunice; but had her life depended upon it she could not have eaten them and the plate which James had filled so plentifully scarcely diminished at all.  She did pick a little with her fork at the white, tender turkey, and tried to drink her coffee, but the pain in her head and the pain at her heart were both too great to allow of her doing more, and Mrs. Markham and Eunice both felt a growing contempt for a dainty thing who could not eat the dinner they had been at so much pains to prepare.

Ethelyn knew their opinion of her as well as if it had been expressed in words; but they were so very far beneath her that whatsoever they might think was not of the slightest consequence.  They were a vulgar, ignorant set, the whole of them, she mentally decided, as she watched their manners at table, noticing how James and John poured their coffee into their saucers, blowing it until it was cool, while Richard, feeling more freedom now that he was again under his mother’s wing, used his knife altogether, even to eating jelly with it.  Ethelyn was disgusted, and once, as Richard’s well-filled knife was moving toward his mouth, she gently touched his foot with her own; but if he understood her he did not heed her, and went quietly on with his dinner.  Indeed, it might be truly said of him that “Richard was himself again,” for his whole manner was that of a petted child, which, having returned to the mother who spoiled it, had cast off the restraint under which for a time it had been laboring.  Richard was hungry, and would have enjoyed his dinner hugely but for the cold, silent woman beside him, who, he knew, was watching and criticising all he did; but somehow at home he did not care so much for her criticisms as when alone with her at fashionable hotels or with fashionable people.  Here he was supreme, and none had ever disputed his will.  Perhaps if Ethelyn had known all that was in his heart she might have changed her tactics and tried to have been more conciliatory on that first evening of her arrival at his home.  But Ethelyn did not know—­she only felt that she was homesick and wretched—­and pleading a headache, from which she was really suffering, she asked to go to her room as soon as dinner was over.

It was very pleasant up there, for a cheerful wood fire was blazing on the hearth, and a rocking-chair drawn up before it, with a footstool which Andy had made and Melinda covered, while the bed in the little room adjoining looked so fresh, and clean, and inviting, that with a great sigh of relief, as the door closed between her and the “dreadful people below,” Ethelyn threw herself upon it, and burying her face in the soft pillows, tried to smother the sobs which, nevertheless, smote heavily upon Richard’s ear when he came in, and drove from him all thoughts of the little lecture he had been intending to give Ethelyn touching her deportment toward his folks.  It would only be a fair return, he reflected, for all the Caudles he had listened to so patiently, and duly strengthened for his task by his mother’s remark to James, accidentally overheard, “Altogether too fine a lady for us.  I wonder what Richard was thinking of,” he mounted the stairs resolved at least to talk with Ethie and ask her to do better.