LOVEDAY GROWS MYSTERIOUS

Too Long; Didn't Read

Estelle was gone so long that I thought she must have stayed to the one o’clock dinner; twelve or one o’clock dinners were universal in Palmyra. But before we reached our apple dumpling dessert she came in, with a glow that was more than that caused by the frosty air. Dave didn’t come home to dinner. The distance from the shipyard was too short to be any hindrance, and Cyrus always came, as a matter of course, but Dave said that a workman could not make his toilet in the middle of the day. He said it without the least bitterness; from first to last there never was any bitterness about Dave. Sometimes I thought Cyrus would have a higher opinion of him if he would take his punishment—or his penance—less cheerfully. I suppose we should not have liked Dave to sit at the table in his workman’s clothes, not because he was a workman, but because he was Dave. I always thought, while I ate, of Dave with the cold luncheon which he carried. Cyrus had arranged a way for the workmen to heat their coffee—that was after Estelle insisted upon carrying something hot to Dave. But I think it was Dave himself who stopped her. While he was far from posing as a martyr he was determined to do the real thing, as a workman should. “No, I didn’t stay to dinner,” Estelle said in answer to Octavia’s question. “There was turnip in the soup; it smelled all over the house.” Estelle was fastidious to a degree, and so, indeed, was Dave, far more so than the rest of us. “But I had some of Rob’s broth, which he wouldn’t touch, and a bit of toast. I don’t want any dinner.” She spoke absent-mindedly, and she didn’t reply to grandma and Octavia who gently remonstrated, or to Loveday, who first scolded, and then immediately had a piece of yesterday’s plum-pudding warmed for her. Estelle was fond of plum-pudding and Loveday always saved a piece for her, as she had done from the time she was a child.