“That’s so,” said the young man.

Abby’s hand tightened over the one on the kerosene-can.  “You are a good fellow, Granville Joy,” she said again.

Chapter XXV

Robert Lloyd was sitting on the veranda behind the green trail of vines when Ellen came up the walk.  He never forgot the girl’s face looking over her bunch of sweet-peas.  There was in it something indescribably youthful and innocent, almost angelic.  The light from the window made her hair toss into gold; her blue eyes sought Cynthia with the singleness of blue stars.  It was evident whom she had come to see.  She held out her flowers towards her with a gesture at once humble and worshipful, like that of some devotee at a shrine.

She said “Good-evening” with a shy comprehensiveness, then, to Cynthia, like a child, “I thought maybe you would like some of my sweet-peas.”

Both gentlemen rose, and Risley looked curiously from the young girl to Cynthia, then placed his chair for her, smiling kindly.

“The sweet-peas are lovely,” Cynthia said.  “Thank you, my dear.  They are much prettier than any I have had in my garden this year.  Please sit down,” for Ellen was doubtful about availing herself of the proffered chair.  She had so hoped that she might find Cynthia alone.  She had dreamed, as a lover might have done, of a tete-a-tete with her, what she would say, what Cynthia would say.  She had thought, and trembled at the thought, that possibly Cynthia might kiss her when she came or went.  She had felt, with a thrill of spirit, the touch of Cynthia’s soft lips on hers, she had smelt the violets about her clothes.  Now it was all spoiled.  She remembered things which she had heard about Mr. Risley’s friendship with Cynthia, how he had danced attendance upon her for half a lifetime, and thought that she did not like him.  She looked at his smiling, grizzled, blond face with distrust.  She felt intuitively that he saw straight through her little subterfuge of the flowers, that he divined her girlish worship at the shrine of Cynthia, and was making fun of her.

“Do you object to a cigar, Miss Brewster?” asked Robert, and Risley looked inquiringly at her.

“Oh, no,” replied Ellen, with the eager readiness of a child to fit into new conditions.  She thought of the sitting-room at home, blue with the rank pipe-smoke of Nahum Beals and his kind.  She pictured them to herself sitting about on these warm evenings in their shirt-sleeves, and she saw the two gentlemen in their light summer clothes with their fragrant cigars at their lips, and all of a sudden she realized that between these men and the others there was a great gulf, and that she was trying to cross it.  She did not realize, as later, that the gulf was one of externals, and of width rather than depth, but it seemed to her then that from one shore she could only see dimly the opposite.  A great fear and jealousy came over her as to her own future accessibility to those of the other kind among whom she had been brought up, like her father and Granville.