Page:Watch and Ward (Boston, Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1878).djvu/35

32 it was not only a stupid child that could sit for an hour by the chimney-corner, stroking the cat's back in absolute silence, asking neither questions nor favors. Then, meeting her intelligent eyes, he would fancy that she was wiser than he knew; that she was mocking him or judging him, and counterplotting his pious labors with elfish subtlety. Arrange it as he might, he could not call her pretty. Plain women are apt to be clever; might she not (horror of horrors!) turn out too clever? In the evening, after she had attended Nora to bed, Lucinda would come into the little library, and she and Roger would solemnly put their heads together. In matters in which he deemed her sex gave her an advantage of judgment, he used freely to ask her opinion. She made a great parade of motherly science, rigid spinster as she was, and hinted by many a nod and wink at the mystic depths of her sagacity. As to the child's being thankless or heartless, she quite reassured him. Did n't she cry herself to sleep, under her breath, on her little pillow? Did n't she mention him every night in her prayers,—him, and him alone? However much her family may have left to be desired as a "family,"—and of its shortcomings in this respect Lucinda had an altogether awful sense,—Nora was clearly a lady in her own right. As for her plain face, they could wait awhile for a change. Plainness in a child was almost always prettiness in a woman; and at all events, if she was not to be pretty, she need never be proud.

Roger had no wish to remind his young companion of what she owed him; for it was the very keystone of his plan that their relation should ripen into a perfect matter