“Good is the will of the Lord concerning me.”
If Felix could have listened and understood, would he have been comforted, too?
His voice held her when her attention wavered; afterward, that one sentence was all that had fastened itself; and was not that enough for one life time?
At the door, Dr. Towne stood waiting for his mother, and Mr. Hammerton and Dinah were moving towards the group.
“I knew that you would be here,” said Dinah, “so I coaxed Gus away from father. I couldn’t wait to tell you that your books have come. Two splendid dozens in all colors; I had to open them. You don’t mind? Gus and I each read a brown one; we think the crimson and blue ones must be splendid.”
Sue drew Tessa aside to coax in her plaintively miserable voice, “Come home with me; father will say things, and I shall be afraid.”
“You mean you _won’t_. I’ll elope with Dr. Lake, and then Dunellen will be on fire, and you don’t care.”
“I’m not afraid. He has good sense, if you haven’t.”
“Nobody ever had so much trouble before,” sighed Sue as she went off.
Mr. Hammerton was in high glee and teased Tessa all the way home about her book.
“The milk pails were on the fence twice, Lady Blue, that is tautology.”
“And the grandmother was always knitting.”
“Lady Blue, you are on the road to Poverty; he who walks the streets of Literature will stop at the house of Starvation. Homer was a beggar; Terence was a slave; Tasso was a poor man; Bacon was as poor as a church mouse; Cervantes died of nothing to eat. Are you not beginning to feel the pangs of hunger? Breath and memory fail me, or I would convince you. Collins died of neglect; Milton was an impecunious genius; every body knows how wretchedly poor Goldsmith was; and wasn’t poor old prodigious Sam Johnson hungry half his life? Chatterton destroyed himself. I tremble for you, child of Genius! Author of ‘Under the Wings,’ what hast thou to say in defence of thy mad career?”
“Don’t mind him, Tessa,” consoled Dinah, “he does like your book; he said that he had no idea that you could do so well; that there was great promise in it, that it revealed a thoughtful mind—he said it to father—that the delineation of character was fine, and that it had the real thing in it. What is the real thing?”