“Yo’ brotha says don’t hurry packin’; Woodson ain’t goin’ to come fur your trunks tell mornin’.”
“All right, thank you,” glancing towards him for an instant carelessly and going on with her work.
“That’s absurd: you knew all along I was going away,” she returned, with countenance as expressionless as feminine subtlety could make it.
“W’y don’t you let somebody else do that? Can’t you come out yere a w’ile?”
“No, I prefer doing it myself; and I don’t care to go out.”
What could he do? what could he say? There were no convenient depths in his mind from which he might draw at will, apt and telling speeches to taunt her with. His heart was swelling and choking him, at sight of the eyes that looked anywhere, but in his own; at sight of the lips that he had one time kissed, pressed into an icy silence. She went on with her task of packing, unmoved. He stood a while longer, silently watching her, his hat in his hands that were clasped behind him, and a stupor of grief holding him vise-like. Then he walked away. He felt somewhat as he remembered to have felt oftentimes as a boy, when ill and suffering, his mother would put him to bed and send him a cup of bouillon perhaps, and a little negro to sit beside him. It seemed very cruel to him now that some one should not do something for him--that he should be left to suffer this way. He walked across the lawn over to the cottage, where he saw Fanny pacing slowly up and down the porch.
She saw him approach and stood in a patch of sunlight to wait for him. He really had nothing to say to her as he stood grasping two of the balustrades and looking up at her. He wanted somebody to talk to him about Melicent.
“Did you know Miss Melicent was goin’ away?”
Had it been Hosmer or Thérèse asking her the question she would have replied simply “yes,” but to Grégoire she said “yes; thank Goodness,” as frankly as though she had been speaking to Belle Worthington. “I don’t see what’s kept her down here all this time, anyway.”
“You don’t like her?” he asked, stupefied at the strange possibility of any one not loving Melicent to distraction.
“No. You wouldn’t either, if you knew her as well as I do. If she likes a person she goes on like a lunatic over them as long as it lasts; then good-bye John! she’ll throw them aside as she would an old dress.”