She said, “I was afraid you would think that—­or momma was—­and I couldn’t bear to have you.”

“Well, then, I won’t.”

XIX.

Breckon had answered with gayety, but his happiness was something beyond gayety.  He had really felt the exclusion from the Kentons in which he had passed the day, and he had felt it the more painfully because he liked them all.  It may be owned that he liked Ellen best from the beginning, and now he liked her better than ever, but even in the day’s exile he had not ceased to like each of them.  They were, in their family affection, as lovable as that sort of selfishness can make people.  They were very united and good to one another.  Lottie herself, except in her most lurid moments, was good to her brother and sister, and almost invariably kind to her parents.  She would not, Breckon saw, have brooked much meddling with her flirtations from them, but as they did not offer to meddle, she had no occasion to grumble on that score.  She grumbled when they asked her to do things for Ellen, but she did them, and though she never did them without grumbling, she sometimes did them without being asked.  She was really very watchful of Ellen when it would least have been expected, and sometimes she was sweet.  She never was sweet with Boyne, but she was often his friend, though this did not keep her from turning upon him at the first chance to give him a little dig, or a large one, for that matter.  As for Boyne, he was a mass of helpless sweetness, though he did not know it, and sometimes took himself for an iceberg when he was merely an ice-cream of heroic mould.  He was as helplessly sweet with Lottie as with any one, and if he suffered keenly from her treacheries, and seized every occasion to repay them in kind, it was clearly a matter of conscience with him, and always for the good.  Their father and mother treated their squabbles very wisely, Breckon thought.  They ignored them as much as possible, and they recognized them without attempting to do that justice between them which would have rankled in both their breasts.

To a spectator who had been critical at first, Mr. and Mrs. Kenton seemed an exemplary father and mother with Ellen as well as with their other children.  It is easy to be exemplary with a sick girl, but they increasingly affected Breckon as exemplary with Ellen.  He fancied that they acted upon each other beneficially towards her.  At first he had foreboded some tiresome boasting from the father’s tenderness, and some weak indulgence of the daughter’s whims from her mother; but there was either never any ground for this, or else Mrs. Kenton, in keeping her husband from boasting, had been obliged in mere consistency to set a guard upon her own fondness.