“Will Miss Marion, his brown girl, like it?” inquired Judith, unexpectedly.
“I don’t know, I saw her; I shouldn’t _think_ he would like to go and leave us all,” said Don’s little cousin, chokingly, keeping back the tears.
“He has a heartache to-night, poor boy. Now, little nurse, mother’s tired. We will have prayer and go early to bed.”
“The worst is not So long as we can sing: _This is the worst_.”
The two parlors were swept and dusted; Marion Kenney enjoyed the Friday sweeping; she stood in the center of the back parlor, cheese-cloth duster in hand, taking a satisfied survey of the two comfortable, old-fashioned rooms.
“Well, you _are_ picturesque!” exclaimed a voice from the doorway of the back parlor.
With all her twenty-one years, Marion Kenney was girlish enough to give a swift, shy look the length of the rooms to the long mirror between the windows in the front parlor. But picturesque was only—picturesque.
“I don’t see what a girl has to dress herself in furbelows for,” he went on, ardently, and with evident embarrassment, “when there’s nothing more becoming than the housekeeping costume; you are as bewitching in that red sweeping-cap as in your most fashionable headgear.”
“I like my morning dresses, too,” she said, with a flutter of breath and color, “perhaps because I’m nothing but a humdrum girl at home.”
“The humdrum girl is getting to be the girl of the age,” he ran on, his words tumbling over each other in the desire to say, for once in his life, the least harmful thing; “all her education tends to bring her down, or up, to the humdrum, if you mean the hum of housekeeping ways. With a sensible education, literary and musical tastes (not talents), a sweet temper, a pretty manner, and the tact that brings out the best in a man, if that is humdrum”—he broke off abruptly, for he had kindled a light in her face that he had no right to see.
“Have I told you about my little cousin Judith? But I know I have. She’s a womanly little thing—too womanly. She’s the sweetest prophecy of a woman. Oh, I remember I promised to take you to see my Aunt Hilda. But that’s another thing to be laid over. If I live to keep all my promises I shall live forever.”
“Don’t say that,” she urged, “you are not just to yourself. That is the only promise you have failed to keep to me, and there’s time enough for that.”