So the sleepy Sunday morning passed. Mr. Pryor roamed about the
garden, looking furtively over his shoulder now and then--but Helena
had disappeared. "Sulking in her room, I suppose," he thought.
He had come at some inconvenience, to spend Sunday and talk over this
project of the child, "for I'd like to see her happier," he told
himself; and now, instead of sitting down, sensibly, to discuss
things, she flared out over this invitation to supper. Her intensity
fatigued him. "I must be getting old," he ruminated, "and Helena will
always be the age she was ten years ago. Ten? It's thirteen! How time
flies; she was twenty. How interested I was in Frederick's health in
those days!"
He stretched himself out on the bench under the poplar, and lit
another cigar. "If I'm willing to go, why is she so exercised?
Women are all alike--except Alice." He smiled as he thought of his
girl, and instantly the hardness in his face lifted, as a cloud shadow
lifts and leaves sunshine behind it. Then some obscure sense of
fitness made him pull himself together, and put his mind on affairs
that had nothing in common with Helena; affairs in which he could
include his girl without offending his taste.
After a while he got up and wandered about between the borders, where
the clean, bitter scent of daffodils mingled with the box. Once he
stood still, looking down over the orchard on the hill-side below him,
at the bright sheen of the river edged with leafless maples; on its
farther side were the meadows, and then the hills, smoky in their warm
haze. Over all was the pale April sky with skeins of gray cloud in the
west. He wondered what Alice was doing at this moment, and looked at
his watch. She must be just coming back from church. When he was at
home Mr. Pryor went to church himself, and watched her saying her
little prayers. This assumption of the Pryor-Barr liabilities would be
a serious check to the fortune he was building up for her; he set his
jaw angrily at the thought, but of course it couldn't be helped.
Furthermore, Alice took great pride in the almost quixotic sense of
honor that had prompted the step; a pride which gave him a secret
satisfaction, quite fatuous and childlike and entirely out of keeping
with certain other characteristics, also secret.
There was a gleam of humor in his eyes, as he said to himself that he
hoped Alice would not ask him how he had spent his Sunday morning.
Alice had such a feeling about truth, that he did not like to tell her
even little lies, little ones that she could not possibly find out. It
was the sentiment of fibbing to his girl that offended him, not the
fib; for Mr. Lloyd Pryor had no doubt that, in certain matters, Truth
must be governed by the law of benefit.