Jack looked thoughtfully at his cigar, and Aunt Love, from her neighboring chair, looked at him.
"I will tell you," she said, after waiting a moment to see if her guest wished to proceed. "I will tell you everything I can. Do you want to ask me questions, or shall I just talk to you a little?"
"I want to know just how ill he was through the summer. I was deliberately kept in the dark."
Miss Berry was alert to perceive the resentment in the quiet tone.
"He wasn’t ill at all. Not so to say real sick," she replied. "His head didn’t feel quite right after that light shock he got in the spring, and he thought he was takin’ every precaution by comin’ out of all the excitement of his busy life, right to this farm. The doctor said it was just the best thing he could do; and Mrs. Van Tassel"—
"Then he was not confined to his bed here?"
"No, indeed. Not a day. He had a steamer chair out under the big elm, and it never seemed to fret him a bit to be idle; and his wife"—
"He used to write me from under that tree," said Jack thickly.
"Yes, indeed he did; and he liked to be read to, and to play backgammon; and whenever Mrs. Van Tassel"—
"I ought to have been here to wait on him. What I was cheated out of!"
"But, Mr. Jack," Miss Berry spoke pleadingly, "you was trampin’ through Switzerland, and just havin’ the best time of all. Your father used to have guide-books and atlases, and follow up what you were doin’ every day. Why, he entered into it, and enjoyed it just as if it was himself. He didn’t know, and Mrs. Van Tassel didn’t know, that there wasn’t many another summer comin’."
"It makes it especially hard," said Jack, still staring at the forgotten cigar, dropped now into the saucer, "that I had been away from him four years already. The past summer is the one I should have spent with him. It seems as though the regret and the loss could never be forgotten. There never was such a father as mine." The speaker’s features worked convulsively an instant. "The world is only a big, barren desert, without him, and I might have had all those months. I might"—
Aunt Love used to feel an especial tenderness for Jack when she tucked him into bed at night, because he had no mother to do it for him, and she had often kissed the child after he was asleep, for the same reason. Now his pale face in its pain and effort at self-mastery appealed to her irresistibly. In a moment she had slipped her arm around his shoulders, and with her other hand drawn his head gently against her breast.