er reading--and eating." Lydia hadn't known she could be so
hateful. Still she was telling the exact truth. "We talked a few minutes
and I came away."

"Did she--" at last suddenly and painfully thrown out of his nonchalant
run of talk, he stopped.

"She's a horrid woman," said Lydia, crimson with her own daring, and got
up and ran out of the room.

Anne looked appealingly at Jeff, in a way of begging him to remember how
young Lydia was, and perhaps how spoiled. But he wasn't disturbed. He
only said to his father in a perfectly practical way:

"Women never did like her, you know."

So Anne got up and went out, thinking it was the moment for him and his
father to pace along together on this road of masculine understanding.
She found Lydia by the dining-room window, savagely drying her cheeks.
Lydia looked as if she had cried hard and scrubbed the tears off and
cried again, there was such wilful havoc in the pink smoothness of her
face.

"Isn't he hateful?" she asked Anne, with an incredulous spite in her
voice. "How could anybody that belonged to Farvie be so rough? I can't
endure him, can you?"

Anne looked distressed. When there were disagreements and cross-purposes
they made her almost ill. She would go about with a physical nausea upon
her, wishing the world could be kind.

"But he's only just--free," she said.

They were still making a great deal of that word, she and Lydia. It
seemed the top of earthly fortune to be free, and abysmal misery to have
missed it.

"I can't help it," said Lydia. "What does he want to act so for? Why
does he talk about such places, as if anybody could be in them?"

"Prisons?"

"Yes. And talking about going West as if Farvie hadn't just lived to get
him back. And about her as if she wasn't any different from what he
expected and you couldn't ask her to be anything else."

"But she's his wife," said Anne gently. "I suppose he loves her. Let's
hope he does."

"You can, if you want to," said Lydia, with a wet handkerchief making
another renovating attack on her face. "I sha'n't. She's a horrid
woman."

They parted then, for their household deeds, but all through the morning
Lydia had a fire of curiosity burning in her to know what Jeff was
doing. He ought, she knew, to be sitting by Farvie, keeping him company,
in a passionate way, to make up for the years. The years seemed
sometimes like a colossal mistake in nature that everybody had got to
make up for--make up to ever